The Good, the Bad and the New Calvinist

It turns out the Time magazine article on the New Calvinists was inaccurate. I missed it as well.

The good news is that they worship a Sovereign & Holy God who saves whom He will. Presumably (?) they assert and clearly articulate the central dogma of the Reformation as well: justification by grace alone, through faith alone on account of Christ alone.

To the extent they maintain these truths they are closer to the old Calvinists than modern Arminian Dispensationalists.

The bad news is that the "New Calvinists" is a term coined by an emerging, more-open-worship, brand of 5-Point Calvinists, many of whom appear to be Charismatic as well.

Driscoll is a charismatic--he believes prophecies are still active today (Resurgence blog).
Piper has similar beliefs (as I discovered in my own research, reading his sermon on Acts 2).

Mohler is a plain-ol' non-covenantal 5-Point Calvinist, Baptist as near as I can tell.

The New Calvinist article can still be used by the old Calvinists if only because many Christians and non-Christians are completely oblivious of the distinction. Now armed with this knowledge, if your friend reads the article, commenting that he's never even heard of Calvinism, you can gentle point him away from the bad and the ugly toward the good and wholesome truths of Calvinism pure and unfettered.

SDG