New Calvinists reimagined God’s wrath and atonement as an explicitly masculine theology

Evidence

Even as they rejected or deemphasized many elements of the broader confessional tradition of Calvinism and Reformed theology (including infant baptism, covenantal theology, and a more nuanced understanding of biblical authority over against a simplistic commitment to inerrancy), New Calvinists claimed to find in sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin and later Puritan scholars a meatier Christianity that would serve as an antidote to a “softer” evangelicalism. Suppressing the emotive side of evangelical revivalism, they emphasized the existence of hell and the wrath of God, which required Jesus’ substitutionary atonement, his bloody death on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins. Theirs was a properly masculine theology, the story of a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his own Son. Strict gender complementarianism was at the heart of this Calvinist resurgence. For leaders of the movement, patriarchal power was at the core of gospel Christianity; in the words of John Piper, God had given Christianity “a masculine feel.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 452

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines New Calvinism as a movement: selective retrieval of Reformed theology (discarding covenant theology and infant baptism, keeping inerrancy) rebuilt around complementarianism and a masculine God.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move that matters is the selective retrieval — New Calvinists discard most of the confessional tradition while claiming Calvin’s authority, constructing a ‘masculine’ God from the atonement alone. This is the load-bearing theoretical claim for the reader’s continuity-not-hypocrisy argument, and it resists one-sentence summarization.
• XREF: The gendered God — a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his Son — directly parallels the sacrificial-violence themes of the earlier sacrificial-violence article.