The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Attending any conference is a mixed bag: some presentations that look enticing in the schedule turn out to be duds; others that had no apparent appeal are gems. The Calvin 500 conference is no exception, although on the whole it has been a disappointment.

The best part of the conference (apart from Geneva itself) has been the keynote addresses each day. They have uniformly been the best presentations, from John Witte's "Calvin and the Law" -- which managed to outshine the preceding paper on Ecclesiastical Discipline by several magnitudes while covering the same territory and much more -- to Bruce McCormack's rebuttal to a revisionist trend in Calvin's soteriology that did not only rebut, it "kicked butt." The other papers (for a total of five each morning) have ranged from tedious to mildly interesting. However, ramming 150 people into a poorly vented auditorium with bad acoustics to listen to someone READ a paper in what is obviously a foreign language to them is an effective remedy to insomnia. The forty minute length of each presentation, without any opportunity for discussion or engagement is both bad planning and bad pedagogy.

The worst part of the conference, in my opinion, has been the evening worship, in particular, the preaching. Not only are all the preachers male (there was one female paper presenter), they all come from the same narrow branch of evangelical Calvinism. They claim to be "biblical preachers" but their sermons show almost no evidence of exegesis. They are so similar, in fact, that two sermon texts are even repeated among the fifteen preachers (three a night x 5 nights!).

And now to the ugly. The sermon Tuesday night by Steven Lawson, "Sr. Pastor, Christ Fellowship Baptist, Mobile, AL," was one of the most egregious abuses of the pulpit I have witnessed. Titled, "Guarding the Gospel," it was an inflammatory call to religious militancy. Change a few words, and you might think it was a fatwah being preached by a leader of the Taliban. A few notes I took when I wasn't stunned into paralysis:

"Anyone who rejects (here followed a long list of "fundamentals" including)... the Virgin Birth... Penal Substitution (atonement theory)... and physical bodily resurrection shall be accursed."

"It is better to consign them to hell now before they lead others astray."

"We should be appalled that this city of Geneva has become so immoral... that America has become so immoral... that so many mainline denominations have deserted the gospel..."

"The hottest place in hell is reserved for false teachers, who preach another gospel and point others to a way that does not lead to heaven..."

"You cannot please God and please Man (sic). Man-pleasers do not call anathemas on teachers of false gospels. If you please God it doesn't matter whom you displease."

"We should have the sword in one hand and the gospel of truth in the other."

I can smell Servetus burning.

One more observation: the organ in St. Pierre is a magnificent instrument, and the organist (I don't know the name) is a brilliant musician. Shame on Calvin for having demolished the original organ and on his followers for waiting 201 years after his death to restore it!