Your recent editorial confusing evangelical Calvinism with the “straw man” of hyper-Calvinism [“Pewboy meets Calvin,” Sept. 28] reminded me of a letter Virginia Baptist John A. Broadus wrote to Kentucky Baptists' Western Recorder in 1891 after a European tour that included a visit to Calvin's Geneva:
“The people who sneer at what is called Calvinism might as well sneer at Mount Blanc. We are not in the least to defend all of Calvin's opinions or actions, but I do not see how anyone who really understands the Greek of the Apostle Paul or the Latin of Calvin or Turretin can fail to see that these latter did but interpret and formulate substantially what the former teaches” (as quoted in A.T. Robertson, Life and Letters of John A. Broadus [Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1909]: pp. 396-97).
Futhermore, I was reminded of Broadus's memoir of his dear friend and colleague at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, J. P. Boyce, in which he referred to the Calvinism they held in common as “that exalted system of Pauline truth” (p. 73). Earlier in his life, Broadus served as a pastor in Charlottesville and as chaplain at the University of Virginia c. 1851-59, and it was under his preaching there that a certain Albemarle Female Institute student named Lottie Moon was converted. Imagine that! Our great missionary heroine converted under the preaching of one who gladly embraced the doctrines of grace.
Jeffrey T. Riddle, Charlottesville