So every now and then someone will visit RBC and ask if we are a Calvinist Church. I usually try to get them to share what they mean by their question. I have found that the same words mean vastly different things to different people…
Some people are asking because they have had it up to here with Calvinists. Their bad personal experience with persons who were proud, unloving, haughty and unkind have affected them.
This is one more reason why I love the paragraph below. It was written a couple of hundred years ago, by a former slave trader turned preacher and poet. He was also a humble Calvinist.
They who avow the doctrines distinguished by the name of Calvinistic, ought, if consistent with their own principles, to be most gentle and forbearing of all men, in meekness instructing them that oppose. With us, it is a fundamental maxim, that a man can receive nothing but what is given him from heaven (John 3:27). If, therefore, it has pleased God to give us the knowledge of some truths, which are hidden from others, who have the same outward means of information; it is a just reason for thankfulness to him, but will not justify our being angry with them; for we are no better or wiser than they in ourselves, and might have opposed the truths which we now prize, with the same eagerness and obstinacy, if his grace had not made us to differ. If the man, mentioned in John 9, who was born blind, on whom our Lord graciously bestowed the blessing of sight, had taken a cudgel and beat all the blind men he met, because they would not see, his conduct would have greatly resembled that of an angry Calvinist.
John Newton
Via Tony Reinke.