Calvinism and Reformed Theology

1. What Is Calvinism?

Calvinism is the branch of Protestant Christianity that descends from John Calvin (1509-1564) and the Reformed churches of sixteenth-century Switzerland, the Rhineland, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. Calvinism holds that God freely chose, before the foundation of the world, those whom he would save, that this choice rested on his own good pleasure rather than on anything foreseen in the person chosen, and that the grace by which God brings the chosen to faith reaches its goal. The wider name for the tradition is Reformed theology, and it covers far more than predestination: a covenantal reading of the whole Bible, a strict doctrine of worship, a presbyterian or congregational way of governing the church, and a confessional standard that every officer subscribes.

Two words are used almost interchangeably and they are worth separating. Reformed is the historic self-description of these churches, and it names the whole system: the confessions, the covenants, the sacraments, the worship, the government. Calvinism is a later label, applied by outsiders first, and in common English it has narrowed until it usually means the five points of soteriology summarised by the mnemonic TULIP. A Reformed pastor will often say that TULIP is a fifth of his theology at most, and he is right about that.

What Calvinism Is Reacting Against

Calvin and the Reformed writers understood themselves to be recovering Augustine. The late medieval schools had produced a range of accounts of how grace and free choice cooperate, and some popular preaching had drifted toward the idea that a person can take the first step toward God on his own and that God then supplies the rest. The Reformed answer was that fallen humanity is spiritually unable to make that first step, that God supplies the willing as well as the doing, and that any account which leaves the final decision resting on unaided human choice makes salvation partly a human achievement. Whether Catholic teaching actually says what the Reformed thought it said is the question section 9 and section 11 take up.

Where This Page Sits

Calvinism is one family inside the Reformation, and the wider map of who separated from whom is drawn on our guide to the Christian denominations. The historical break itself is covered in the guide to the Reformation, and the Catholic doctrine of grace and free choice is argued in the abstract on the page about free will. This page covers the Reformed system itself: what it teaches, where it came from, who holds it, and what Catholic teaching says in reply.

2. John Calvin and Geneva

John Calvin was a French lawyer and humanist scholar, born at Noyon in Picardy in 1509, who broke with Rome in his mid-twenties and published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, at the age of twenty-six. The Institutes grew through five editions into the definitive Latin text of 1559, and it remains the single most orderly presentation of Protestant theology written in the sixteenth century. Calvin spent most of his working life in Geneva, where he arrived almost by accident in 1536 and where he died in 1564.

Calvin was a second-generation reformer. Huldrych Zwingli had already reformed Zurich and died in 1531, and Heinrich Bullinger had succeeded him. Martin Bucer was leading the reform at Strasbourg, where Calvin spent three formative years after Geneva expelled him in 1538. When Geneva recalled him in 1541, Calvin came back with a plan, and he wrote it into the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of that year.

The Geneva Model

The Ordinances of 1541 set out four offices that the Reformed churches have carried ever since: pastors to preach and administer the sacraments, doctors or teachers to guard sound doctrine, elders to oversee the discipline and conduct of the congregation, and deacons to care for the poor and the sick. Discipline was exercised by the Consistory, a body of pastors and elders that summoned Genevans over quarrels, adultery, absence from preaching and superstition. The Academy of Geneva, founded in 1559, trained ministers who then carried the system into France, the Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary and the Rhineland. Theodore Beza succeeded Calvin as the leading figure and gave Reformed theology much of its later scholastic shape.

The Servetus Case

Honesty about Geneva requires the Servetus case. Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who denied the Trinity and rejected infant baptism, was arrested in Geneva in 1553, tried, and burned at the stake. Calvin supplied evidence against him, pressed for his conviction, and asked that the sentence be changed to beheading, which the council refused. Reformed writers today generally treat the execution as a grave wrong. Catholics have no ground for scoring points here, since Catholic authorities in the same century executed heretics on the same theory of the Christian magistrate, a record examined on our page about the Inquisition. The sixteenth century's shared assumption that error could be punished by the sword is a debt both traditions carry.

Calvin on the Lord's Supper

Calvin's doctrine of the Eucharist sits between Zwingli and Luther, and it matters because it became the Reformed position. Zwingli treated the Supper mainly as a memorial and a pledge of loyalty. Luther held that the body and blood of Christ are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine. Calvin taught that believers who receive in faith are genuinely fed on the body and blood of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, who lifts them up to where Christ is at the right hand of the Father. The Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, agreed between Calvin and Bullinger, secured this reading across the Swiss churches. The Catholic doctrine of the substantial change of the elements is set out on our page about the Eucharist, and the Reformed position denies it while insisting that the Supper is a real communion with Christ and never a bare symbol.

3. The Remonstrants and the Synod of Dort

The five points of Calvinism were formulated at the Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619, more than fifty years after Calvin's death, and they were formulated in response to five articles submitted by his opponents. Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), a professor at the University of Leiden, had come to doubt the strict Reformed account of election, and after his death his followers set out their position in a document called the Remonstrance, presented to the States of Holland in 1610. The men who signed it were called the Remonstrants, and the Synod of Dort was convened to judge their case.

The Five Articles of the Remonstrance (1610)

The Remonstrants stated their position in five articles, and stating them accurately is the first duty of anyone explaining the five points, since the five points are the reply. In their own terms the Remonstrants held:

• Conditional election. God determined from eternity to save, in Christ, those who by his grace believe and persevere in faith. Election is real and eternal, and it is conditioned on foreseen faith.
• Universal atonement. Christ died for every human being and obtained forgiveness for all, though no one actually enjoys that forgiveness except the believer.
• Total inability apart from grace. A person can do nothing truly good, including believing, unless he is born again by the Holy Spirit. On this article the Remonstrants agreed with the strict Reformed almost word for word.
• Resistible grace. All good comes from the grace of God, and that grace is not irresistible: Scripture says that many have resisted the Holy Spirit (Acts 7:51).
• Perseverance left open. Believers have ample power to persevere, and whether a true believer can finally fall away is a question the Remonstrants said needed more study from Scripture before they would settle it.

The third article deserves emphasis because popular accounts get it wrong constantly. The Remonstrants were not Pelagians and did not teach that a person can turn to God under his own power. Later Arminian theology, including the Wesleyan tradition described on our page about Methodism, kept that article and explained the freedom to respond by prevenient grace, a grace given to all that restores the capacity to say yes or no.

The Synod, and Its Politics

The Synod of Dort met at Dordrecht from November 1618 to May 1619. It was an international assembly: delegates came from the Dutch provinces along with representatives from England and Scotland, the Palatinate, Hesse, Switzerland, Geneva, Bremen and Emden. The French Reformed churches elected delegates who were forbidden to travel by their king. The Remonstrants were summoned as defendants rather than seated as members, and after weeks of procedural conflict they were dismissed and judged in their absence.

The political setting was ugly and should be stated plainly. The doctrinal quarrel had fused with a constitutional struggle between Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who protected the Remonstrants, and Maurice of Nassau, the stadtholder, who backed their opponents. Oldenbarnevelt was arrested, tried and beheaded in May 1619, in the same month the Canons were publicly read at Dordrecht. Remonstrant ministers were deposed across the Dutch provinces in large numbers, and many were driven into exile. A doctrinal verdict reached under those conditions is still a doctrinal verdict, and the Canons of Dort have to be assessed on their arguments. The circumstances belong in any honest telling all the same.

What Dort Actually Produced

The Synod issued the Canons of Dort, arranged in five heads of doctrine, though the third and fourth were treated together, so the printed text has four main chapters. Each head states the received doctrine in a series of positive articles and then rejects the specific errors the Synod attributed to the Remonstrants. The order of the heads is: divine election and reprobation; the death of Christ and the redemption of men by it; human corruption, conversion to God, and the manner of that conversion; and the perseverance of the saints.

4. The Five Points as Dort Framed Them

The five points of Calvinism are the five heads of doctrine in the Canons of Dort, and the familiar acronym TULIP came much later. Calvin never used it, never taught a scheme of five points, and would not have recognised the word. TULIP is an English-language teaching device that appears in print in the early twentieth century and spread through American writing on the subject; it works as a memory aid, and it distorts the doctrine in at least two places, as the sections below show. Dort's own order runs election, redemption, corruption and conversion, perseverance, which spells nothing at all.

Source: the five heads of doctrine and the wording summarised here are taken from the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1619) and the Five Articles of the Remonstrance (1610), both of which are published in full by the Reformed churches that confess them, including in the collection of the Three Forms of Unity.

Total Depravity

Total depravity means that sin has reached every faculty of human nature, including the mind and the will, so that no one seeks God or turns to him without grace. Reformed teachers stress that the word total describes the extent of the corruption across the person rather than its intensity in every act: on this doctrine an unbeliever can still be a devoted parent, an honest merchant and a brave soldier. What he cannot do is generate saving faith or spiritual love for God out of his own resources. Dort's third and fourth head puts it as spiritual death, and cites the heart of stone that must be replaced with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).

Catholic teaching on original sin agrees that human nature is wounded, that the will is weakened, that the intellect is darkened, and that no one is justified without grace. Catholic teaching stops short of saying the image of God is destroyed or the will annihilated, holding that human nature is deprived of original holiness and wounded in its natural powers (CCC 405). The difference is one of degree at this point, and our page on original sin sets out the Catholic account in full.

Unconditional Election

Unconditional election means that God's choice of those he will save rests on his own sovereign good pleasure and not on any condition met by the person chosen, including foreseen faith. Dort's first head grounds this in Ephesians 1:4-5, where God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world and predestined us for adoption according to the pleasure of his will, and in Romans 9:11-16, where God's choice of Jacob over Esau is made before either had done anything good or bad, so that it might rest on the one who calls. Reformed writers argue that any condition placed on election makes God's eternal decree wait upon a creature.

Dort also teaches reprobation, and Reformed theologians divide over how to state it. The Canons describe God passing by others in his eternal decree and leaving them in the misery into which they have plunged themselves, and condemning them for their unbelief and other sins. This is often called preterition. A stronger position, sometimes called double predestination in the strict sense or supralapsarianism, holds that God's decree to condemn is as positive and direct as his decree to save. That stronger position has never been the confessional consensus, and the Westminster Confession follows the milder wording.

Limited Atonement

Limited atonement, which Reformed writers usually prefer to call particular redemption or definite atonement, means that Christ died with the intention of actually saving the elect, and that his death infallibly secures their salvation. The Canons of Dort are careful here in a way the mnemonic conceals: the second head states that the death of the Son of God is of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world. The limitation falls on the intent and effect of the atonement rather than on its value. The old formula is that Christ's death is sufficient for all and efficient for the elect.

This is the point Reformed people themselves argue about most. Moses Amyraut and the school at Saumur in seventeenth-century France taught a hypothetical universalism in which Christ died for all conditionally, with election then determining who receives the benefit. Many modern evangelicals describe themselves as four-point Calvinists precisely because they hold the other four heads and decline this one.

Irresistible Grace

Irresistible grace, more precisely called effectual calling, means that when God purposes to save a person, the grace he sends achieves what he sends it for. Reformed theologians insist that this involves no coercion of the will. Dort describes the Holy Spirit opening the closed heart, softening the hard heart, and infusing new qualities into the will, so that the person comes to Christ willingly and gladly. The argument is that a renewed will chooses Christ freely because it has been made able to see him as desirable. The texts pressed are John 6:37 and 6:44, where all that the Father gives to the Son will come to him, and no one can come unless the Father draws him.

Reformed theology distinguishes the outward call of the gospel, which goes to everyone who hears preaching and which can be and constantly is refused, from the inward or effectual call, which accompanies the outward call in the elect. Critics of the doctrine, Catholic and Arminian alike, press Acts 7:51, where Stephen tells the council that they always resist the Holy Spirit, and Matthew 23:37, where Christ tells Jerusalem that he longed to gather her children and she was not willing.

Perseverance of the Saints

Perseverance of the saints means that everyone truly regenerated by God will be preserved by him in faith to the end and will finally be saved. Dort's fifth head is more sober than the popular slogan suggests. It concedes that true believers fall into serious sins, that they can grieve the Holy Spirit and interrupt the exercise of faith, and it names David and Peter as examples. What it denies is total and final apostasy from the state of grace. The texts pressed are John 10:28-29 and Philippians 1:6.

Reformed pastors regularly distinguish this doctrine from the popular American slogan "once saved, always saved," when that slogan is used to mean that a profession of faith at a single moment guarantees salvation regardless of how a person then lives. The Canons of Dort and the Westminster Confession both teach that God preserves his people through means, including the preaching of the word, the sacraments, prayer and repentance, and that a life of settled unrepented sin gives no ground for assurance at all.

5. Covenant Theology

Covenant theology is the Reformed framework for reading the whole Bible as one unfolding relationship between God and his people, structured by a small number of covenants. Reformed theologians usually name two or three. The covenant of works is the arrangement God made with Adam in Eden, promising life on condition of obedience. The covenant of grace is the arrangement God made after the fall, promising salvation through a redeemer, administered through Noah, Abraham, Moses and David and reaching its fullness in Christ. Many Reformed writers add a covenant of redemption, an eternal agreement within the Trinity in which the Father gives a people to the Son and the Son undertakes to redeem them.

Adam and Christ as Federal Heads

The covenant scheme rests on the idea of federal headship, that Adam acted on behalf of the whole human race and Christ acts on behalf of his people. Paul's argument in Romans 5:12-21 sets the two men in parallel: through one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, and through one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. Reformed theology takes that parallel as structural and builds the doctrine of imputation on it. Adam's guilt is reckoned to his descendants, and Christ's righteousness is reckoned to those united to him by faith.

Catholic teaching also reads Romans 5 as the key text on original sin and on Christ as the new Adam, and the Council of Trent's decree on original sin in 1546 cites it directly. The Catholic account of what happens in justification differs: Catholic teaching holds that grace really renews the person inwardly, so that righteousness is infused rather than only reckoned. That difference is the substance of the argument set out on our page about faith and works.

One Covenant, and Therefore Infant Baptism

The practical consequence of covenant theology is baptismal. If the covenant of grace is one covenant administered in two testaments, then the children of believers belong to the covenant community exactly as the children of Israelites did, and baptism now takes the place circumcision held then. Paul makes that connection in Colossians 2:11-12, and Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost that the promise is for them and for their children (Acts 2:39). Continental Reformed and Presbyterian churches baptise infants on this reasoning, and the Westminster Confession's chapter on baptism requires that the infants of one or both believing parents be baptised.

Reformed Baptists accept most of the covenant scheme and reject this conclusion, holding that the new covenant is made only with those who actually believe, so that baptism follows profession of faith. That argument is set out from the Baptist side on our page about the Baptists. The Catholic Church baptises infants and teaches that baptism confers the forgiveness of sin and new birth in the Holy Spirit, and it agrees with the Reformed on the practice while grounding it in the sacrament's own efficacy, as explained on our page about baptism.

6. The Regulative Principle of Worship

The regulative principle of worship is the Reformed rule that public worship may include only what God has commanded in Scripture, and that whatever Scripture has not commanded is excluded. The Westminster Confession states it directly in its chapter on religious worship: the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by God himself and so limited by his own revealed will that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men. Reformed worship therefore reduces to the elements the Reformed find commanded: the reading and preaching of Scripture, prayer, the singing of praise, the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the religious oaths, vows, solemn fastings and thanksgivings the Confession names for special occasions.

The alternative rule, held by Lutherans and by classical Anglicans, is sometimes called the normative principle: whatever Scripture does not forbid may be retained if it serves order and edification. That single disagreement explains most of the visible difference between a Lutheran church and a Presbyterian meeting house, as our pages on Lutheranism and Anglicanism describe from those traditions' own side.

What the Principle Removed

Applied strictly, the regulative principle removed a great deal. Images and statues went, on the Reformed reading of the second commandment as a separate commandment binding on Christians (Exodus 20:4-6). The Heidelberg Catechism teaches in its questions on that commandment that God cannot and may not be pictured, and that the living preaching of his word is how he wills his people to be taught, rejecting the older description of images as books for the unlettered. Vestments, the liturgical calendar beyond the Lord's Day, set liturgical prayers in some bodies, organs and instruments in others, and the ceremonies of the Mass all went for the same reason.

Some Reformed churches carried the principle to exclusive psalmody, singing only the biblical psalms in metrical versions, and some sing them without instrumental accompaniment. The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America and several Scottish Presbyterian bodies still worship this way. The Genevan Psalter, the Scottish Psalter of 1650 and the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 all come from this conviction, and the tradition has produced music of real beauty.

The Catholic Answer

Catholic teaching answers on two grounds, one biblical and one christological. Biblically, God himself commanded ornament and imagery in the worship he prescribed: the cherubim woven into the tabernacle curtains and worked in gold on the ark (Exodus 25:18-22), the carved figures and palm trees of Solomon's temple (1 Kings 6:29), and the bronze serpent Moses was told to make and raise (Numbers 21:8-9), which Christ took as a figure of himself (John 3:14). A rule that excludes images from worship has to account for a God who ordered them.

Christologically, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 settled the question for the whole Church of that era by teaching that the Son of God took real flesh, and that the invisible God having become visible may therefore be depicted. Honour paid to an image passes to the one it represents, and the veneration given to images differs in kind from the adoration owed to God alone. The Catechism restates this teaching directly (CCC 1159-1162, 2131-2132). The Eastern Orthodox churches hold the same doctrine and defend it with equal force, as our page on the Eastern Orthodox Church explains.

Catholics should still hear what the regulative principle protects. It exists because worship is God's before it is ours, and because a congregation that treats worship as an outlet for its own preferences will eventually worship its preferences. Catholic liturgical law says something structurally similar when it insists that no one, even a priest, may add, remove or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority (Sacrosanctum Concilium 22). Our page on the Mass sets out what the Catholic Church believes it has been commanded to do.

7. The Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards

Reformed churches are confessional churches, which means their doctrine is fixed in public documents that ministers and elders subscribe before they may hold office. Two collections dominate. Continental Reformed churches, those of Dutch, German, Hungarian and French descent, confess the Three Forms of Unity. English-speaking Presbyterian churches confess the Westminster Standards. Knowing which set a church subscribes tells you a great deal about it before you walk in.

The Three Forms of Unity

• The Belgic Confession (1561). Written by Guido de Bres, a Reformed pastor in the Low Countries who was executed in 1567. Its thirty-seven articles were composed partly to show the Spanish authorities that the Reformed were orthodox Christians and loyal subjects rather than revolutionaries.
• The Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Commissioned by Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate and produced at Heidelberg. Its one hundred and twenty-nine questions are divided across fifty-two Lord's Days for weekly preaching, and it opens with the famous question about a person's only comfort in life and in death, answered by belonging body and soul to a faithful Saviour. It is the warmest document the Reformed tradition produced.
• The Canons of Dort (1619). The five heads of doctrine described in section 3 and section 4, functioning as the Reformed judgment in the Arminian controversy.

The Westminster Standards

The Westminster Assembly sat at Westminster Abbey from 1643, called by the English Long Parliament during the civil wars, with Scottish commissioners taking part. It produced the Westminster Confession of Faith (completed 1646), the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647), a Directory for the Public Worship of God and a Form of Presbyterial Church Government. The Restoration settlement of 1660 to 1662 restored episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer in England, so the Confession's lasting home became Scotland and the Presbyterian churches that spread from it across the world.

The Confession's third chapter, on God's eternal decree, is the most quoted paragraph in Reformed theology: God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass, yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures. Reformed theologians take that final clause with complete seriousness, and their critics argue that it cannot be held together with the first. That is the real philosophical dispute underneath the whole subject.

The Shorter Catechism opens with a question generations of children learned by heart, asking what the chief end of man is, and answering that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. Catholics have no quarrel with that sentence. The Baltimore Catechism's answer to why God made us runs along the same line, and both traditions are drawing on Augustine.

Other Reformed Confessions Worth Knowing

• The Scots Confession (1560), drafted by John Knox and five colleagues, the founding document of the Scottish Reformation.
• The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), written by Heinrich Bullinger, adopted widely across Switzerland, Hungary, Poland and Scotland.
• The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), which carry a Reformed doctrine of predestination in their seventeenth article while retaining bishops and a liturgy, one reason the Anglican tradition has always contained a Reformed party.
• The Savoy Declaration (1658), the Congregational revision of Westminster, altering the chapters on church government.
• The Second London Baptist Confession (1689), the Reformed Baptist revision of Westminster, altering the chapters on baptism and the church.

8. Reformed and Presbyterian Bodies Today

Reformed Christianity today divides into four main streams, distinguished by church government and confession rather than by any real difference over the doctrine of grace. Continental Reformed churches descend from the Dutch, German, Swiss, French and Hungarian reformations and confess the Three Forms of Unity. Presbyterian churches descend from Scotland and confess the Westminster Standards. Congregational churches keep Reformed doctrine with independent local government. Reformed Baptists hold Reformed soteriology with believer's baptism and congregational government.

Source: the World Communion of Reformed Churches reports on its own account that its membership comprises around two hundred and thirty churches in more than one hundred countries, representing roughly one hundred million Christians. Broader Protestant population shares cited across this site come from the Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity, which does not break Reformed Christians out as a separate category.

Where the Reformed Churches Are

Reformed Christianity began in Europe and its centre of gravity has moved. Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Hungary hold the historic national churches, and church attendance in most of them has fallen sharply over the last century. The Presbyterian churches of South Korea are among the largest in the world by membership, the product of missions that began in the 1880s. Reformed and Presbyterian churches are numerous and growing in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia and Brazil, part of the wider southward shift traced on our page about Christianity in Africa.

The Main Bodies by Name

• Scotland and Ireland: the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
• The Netherlands: the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, formed in 2004 from a Reformed and Lutheran merger, alongside several smaller conservative Reformed bodies that declined to join it.
• United States and Canada: the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Presbyterian Church in America, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Church in America, the Christian Reformed Church in North America, and the United Church of Christ in its Congregational descent.
• Elsewhere: the Presbyterian churches of Korea, the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, the Reformed Church in Hungary, the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa, and the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan.

Neo-Calvinism and the Modern Revival

Two later developments explain much of the tradition's present shape. Neo-Calvinism, associated with the Dutch theologian and prime minister Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and the theologian Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), applied Reformed thought to public life, education, politics and the arts, on the conviction that Christ's authority covers every sphere of human activity. Kuyper founded a university, a newspaper and a political party, and his influence runs through Reformed institutions to this day.

The second is the resurgence of Reformed soteriology among American and British evangelicals from the 1990s onward, spread through conferences, publishing houses and reprinted Puritan writers, and often labelled the young, restless and Reformed movement after a book of that name. Many of the people who now describe themselves as Calvinists came to it through that revival rather than through a Reformed church, which is why the five points are so often discussed detached from the covenants, the confessions and the worship they belong with.

9. Where Catholics and Calvinists Agree

Catholics and Calvinists agree on far more than the usual arguments suggest, and naming the agreement first is the only honest way to reach the disagreement. Both confess the Trinity as defined at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, and the two natures of Christ as defined at Chalcedon in 451. Both hold that Scripture is inspired by God and without error in what it teaches for our salvation. Both hold that human nature is fallen, that sin is a real offence against God, and that no one is saved apart from the grace of Jesus Christ.

Grace Comes First, and Catholics Say So

The deepest agreement concerns the priority of grace. The Second Council of Orange in 529 condemned the view that a person can make the beginning of faith by his own natural powers and then receive grace to continue. Orange taught that the very desire to be cleansed comes from the infusion and working of the Holy Spirit, and that whatever good we do, God works in us and with us. That council was confirmed by Pope Boniface II, and its teaching stands in Catholic doctrine to this day. The Catechism states it plainly: the free initiative of God demands the free response of man, and man's free response is itself moved and sustained by grace (CCC 2002, and see CCC 1996-1998 on grace as the free and undeserved help God gives).

The Council of Trent, replying to the Reformers in its decree on justification in 1547, opened by teaching that no one can be justified without the prevenient grace of God through Jesus Christ, given without any merits existing beforehand. Trent condemned the idea that a person can be justified by his own works without divine grace, and it condemned the idea that a person can believe, hope and love as he ought without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. A Calvinist reading Trent's chapters rather than the caricature of Trent will find much of his own doctrine of grace in them.

Catholic teaching affirms that verse without qualification. Nobody is saved by works performed apart from grace, and no one earns the initial grace of justification. The disagreement concerns what happens after that grace arrives, which is the argument set out on our page about faith and works.

The Joint Declaration and the Reformed Churches

In 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, agreeing on a basic understanding of justification by grace through faith and stating that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century no longer apply to the teaching set out in that text. The World Communion of Reformed Churches associated itself with that declaration at Wittenberg in July 2017. Real differences remain, and both sides say so within the text. The event is a matter of public record, and it shows how much ground the two traditions found they shared once each stopped answering the other's caricature. Our page on ecumenism covers the wider dialogue.

10. Where Catholic Teaching Differs

Catholic teaching differs from Calvinism on two hinges, and everything else follows from them: God wills the salvation of every human being, and God's grace can be resisted by the creature it is offered to. Hold those two and the five points cannot stand in their Dort form. Deny them and most of the Reformed system follows. The table below states the disagreement head by head, and the sections after it give the Catholic reasoning.

God Wills the Salvation of All

The central Catholic objection is that unconditional reprobation cannot be reconciled with the revealed will of God. Paul tells Timothy that God our Saviour wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:3-4). Peter writes that the Lord is patient, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). God swears through Ezekiel that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and that he would rather they turn from their ways and live (Ezekiel 33:11). The Catechism states the conclusion in one sentence: God predestines no one to go to hell (CCC 1037), and hell is entered by a free and persistent turning away from God.

Reformed theologians answer this text carefully, and their answer deserves to be stated. Many read the all of 1 Timothy 2:4 as all kinds of people, since the preceding verses call for prayer for kings and all in authority, so the point is that God's saving purpose crosses every social class and nation. Others distinguish God's revealed will, which commands all to repent and genuinely offers salvation to all who hear, from God's decretive will, which determines what actually comes to pass. Catholic theology grants the distinction between God's antecedent and consequent will and denies the conclusion drawn from it, since God's antecedent will that all be saved is a real will and not a formality.

Grace Can Be Resisted

Catholic teaching holds that grace really moves the will from within and that the person can still refuse. Stephen tells the Sanhedrin that they always resist the Holy Spirit, as their ancestors did (Acts 7:51). Christ weeps over Jerusalem and says he longed to gather her children as a hen gathers her chicks, and she was not willing (Matthew 23:37). Paul begs the Corinthians not to receive God's grace in vain (2 Corinthians 6:1). The Council of Trent stated the doctrine as a canon: anyone who says that a person's free will, moved and stirred by God, cooperates in no way by assenting to God's stirring and calling, and that it cannot dissent if it wishes, is condemned (Trent, Session VI, canon 4).

Notice the shape of that canon. It does not say the will produces its own movement toward God, and it does not say grace waits passively on human permission. It says grace stirs and moves, and the creature can still say no. Catholic theology calls the grace that a person may refuse sufficient grace, and the grace that in fact obtains consent efficacious grace, and the argument over how those two relate is the argument of section 11.

Assurance and the Loss of Grace

Catholic teaching holds that a baptised person in a state of grace can lose it by mortal sin and be restored through the sacrament of confession. Paul warns the person who thinks he is standing firm to be careful he does not fall (1 Corinthians 10:12), tells the Romans that branches grafted in can be broken off if they do not continue in God's kindness (Romans 11:20-22), and says of himself that he disciplines his body so that after preaching to others he will not be disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27). Trent taught that no one can know with the certainty of faith, free from all error, that he is among the predestined, apart from a special revelation.

Catholics should hold this teaching without anxiety, since Catholic doctrine also teaches a firm hope grounded on God's fidelity rather than on the believer's performance. The Reformed doctrine of assurance is more careful than its reputation as well: the Westminster Confession's chapter on assurance says that a believer's assurance may be shaken, diminished and interrupted, and that a true believer may wait long before obtaining it. Both traditions are trying to protect the same two things, confidence in God and seriousness about sin, and they balance them differently. Our page on salvation sets out the Catholic account in full, and our page on confession covers how grace lost is restored.

The Other Differences

• Authority. The Reformed hold Scripture as the only infallible rule of faith, with the confessions as subordinate standards. Catholics hold Scripture and Tradition together, interpreted by the Church's teaching office (Dei Verbum 9-10). See our page on Sacred Tradition.
• The sacraments. The Reformed confess two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, as signs and seals of the covenant that convey Christ to faith. Catholics confess seven, and hold that they truly effect the grace they signify.
• Justification. The Reformed hold that Christ's righteousness is imputed to the believer, who is declared righteous while remaining a sinner. Catholics hold that grace makes the person inwardly righteous.
• Merit. The Reformed reject the language of merit for good works. Catholics hold that God freely crowns his own gifts, so that the merit of a Christian's good works is itself the fruit of grace (CCC 2008).
• The Church. Presbyterian government by elders in graded assemblies stands against the Catholic order of bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, argued on our pages about the papacy and the priesthood.

For a broader comparison across all these questions, our guide to the Catholic and Protestant differences puts them side by side.

11. The Catholic Doctrine of Predestination

Catholic teaching has a real and demanding doctrine of predestination, and any presentation of Calvinism that treats predestination as a Protestant invention is simply inaccurate. Scripture teaches predestination in Romans 8:29-30 and Ephesians 1:4-5, and the Catholic Church has never denied it. The Catechism speaks of God's eternal plan of predestination in connection with the crucifixion, teaching that God foreknew and permitted the free acts of those who put Christ to death and made use of them to accomplish his plan of salvation (CCC 600). What Catholic teaching denies is that God positively decrees the damnation of anyone.

Augustine and Aquinas

Augustine of Hippo, writing against the Pelagians in the fifth century, taught that God chooses his elect out of the fallen mass of humanity by pure mercy, that the beginning of faith is itself God's gift, and that the gift of perseverance is given to some and withheld from others for reasons hidden in God. Calvin considered himself Augustine's disciple, and on the doctrine of grace the claim is defensible. Augustine is a Doctor of the Catholic Church, and his anti-Pelagian teaching was received at the Council of Orange in 529.

Thomas Aquinas treats predestination in the Summa Theologiae as part of God's providence. He teaches that predestination is a real eternal act of God, that it is the cause of what it foresees in the elect rather than a consequence of foreseen merit, and that God's love is what makes anything in a creature good in the first place. He treats reprobation as God's permission that some fall into sin and his will to inflict the punishment of damnation for that sin, and he insists that God is never the cause of anyone's sin. A Dominican theologian in that line and a Reformed theologian at Dort can conduct a long conversation before they find their disagreement.

The Congregatio de Auxiliis

The sharpest evidence that Catholicism permits a strongly predestinarian theology is a dispute that Rome refused to settle. In the late sixteenth century the Dominican Domingo Banez defended an account in which God's efficacious grace physically predetermines the created will to its act, while infallibly securing the will's freedom. The Jesuit Luis de Molina, in his Concordia of 1588, proposed instead that God possesses middle knowledge, knowing what any free creature would freely do in any possible circumstance, and arranges the circumstances accordingly. Each side accused the other of heresy, Banez of destroying freedom and Molina of making grace depend on the creature.

Pope Clement VIII established a commission, the Congregatio de Auxiliis, meaning the congregation on the aids of grace, which sat from 1598 and heard the arguments over many sessions. In 1607 Pope Paul V ended the proceedings without condemning either position. Both schools were permitted to teach and defend their own view, and both were forbidden to brand the other as heretical. That ruling stands. A Catholic today may hold Banezian Thomism, with its physical premotion and its infallibly efficacious grace, or Molinism, with its middle knowledge, or the Augustinian and Congruist positions in between.

The Two Fences Catholic Teaching Puts Up

Catholic doctrine on this subject is defined mostly by what it excludes. Two positions are ruled out. The first is Pelagian and semi-Pelagian: that a person can begin to turn to God without grace, or can persevere without it. Orange in 529 closed that door. The second is the doctrine of positive reprobation: that God predestines anyone to sin or to hell independently of that person's own sins. The Council of Trent condemned the proposition that God's grace is given in such a way that it cannot be resisted, and the Catechism states that God predestines no one to go to hell (CCC 1037). Between those two fences the Church leaves genuine room, and Catholics have used it for four centuries.

What that means practically is that a Catholic reading Romans 9 does not have to flinch. Paul's argument that God has mercy on whom he wills is Catholic doctrine. The claim Catholic teaching rejects is that God's mercy on some entails a positive divine decree to damn the rest independently of their sins. Our page on free will works through the philosophical account of how a will moved by God remains free, and our page on hell covers what the Church teaches about how a soul arrives there.

12. What to Do With This

Three practical conclusions follow from the whole argument, and each of them changes how you act this week rather than only what you know.

Read the Primary Documents

Anyone arguing about Calvinism should read three short texts before saying another word: the Five Articles of the Remonstrance of 1610, the Canons of Dort of 1619, and the Council of Trent's decree on justification from 1547 with its canons. Together they run to a few dozen pages, and all three are published freely by the bodies that confess them. Reading them will make you slower to accuse and much harder to answer.

Argue With the Real Position

Reformed Christians are not fatalists, do not believe God is the author of sin, and do not teach that evangelism is pointless, since Dort itself insists that the gospel must be preached promiscuously to all. Catholics do not teach that people earn heaven by good behaviour, do not deny predestination, and do not hold that grace is a reward for effort. Every hour spent knocking down a position nobody holds is an hour wasted, and it is uncharitable besides. Learn what your neighbour actually confesses, from his own confession, and then answer that.

Do Not Postpone Your Own Soul

The doctrine of predestination becomes dangerous in one specific way, which is when a person uses it as an excuse to wait. If God has already settled everything, the reasoning goes, then nothing I do now matters. Both traditions reject that reasoning outright. Peter tells his readers to make every effort to confirm their calling and election (2 Peter 1:10), and Paul tells the Philippians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in them to will and to act (Philippians 2:12-13). No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and the time given to you for repentance and for learning your faith is the time in front of you now. A soul that puts off conversion because the question feels too hard is losing something real while the argument goes on.