One of the earliest competing Protestant theologies was that devised by John Calvin, a Frenchman of the 16th century. Its followers call it "Reformed" theology, but given that it was only one of many products of what is generally termed "the Reformation", this label seems an attempt by its adherents simply to assert this belief-system's status as an authoritative norm and claim the high ground. One thing that must be said of Calvin's system, as represented in his work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, is that it is one of the most extensive, coherent (self-consistent) and intelligently argued attempts to fully formulate the Christian faith that has been seen. However, its theology, especially in regard to salvation (how people are reunited to God) is in a number of respects opposed to the teaching of the ancient Church.
That is why Calvinism is clearly identified as heretical by the three largest Churches deriving from the ancient Church, the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Churches. The fourth communion derived from the ancient Church, the Anglican, has doctrinal statements and liturgical elements incompatible with Calvinism, which is why Calvinists within it have attempted (unsuccessfully) to change or add to the Anglican formularies many times (e.g., 1572 in complaints to the English Parliament, 1595 in the "Lambeth Articles", 1604 in amendments proposed at the Hampton Court Conference, etc.). In earlier days, these Calvinists, known as Puritans, usually ended up leaving the Church of England, or, when they were for a period in the ascendency politically, driving it underground. These days, amusingly, Calvinists within Anglicanism instead claim their church's formularies are Calvinist and question the Anglican credentials of those who instead agree with the vast majority of Christians past and present! What does Calvinism teach about salvation, and why is it heretical? What have been the costs of this heresy? Its distinguishing features are conveniently summarised in the acronym "TULIP". Below we will compare the TULIP teachings with those of the Scriptures and the Church. Total Depravity: Non-Christians can perform no truly good or loving act. Original Sin has made mankind "wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of body and soul" and "utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil" (Westminster Confession, VI.2&4). This applies to every act, for the non-Christian is "so wholly alienated from the righteousness of God that he neither knows, desires nor undertakes anything that is not wicked, perverse, iniquitous and defiled" (Calvin's terms in his first Genevan Catechism). Unconditional Election: "Before" time God chose some men and angels to be united in love to Him forever and others, it is said, to be hated and condemned to Hell by Him forever, and not because of his foreknowledge of what they would do and choose, but for inscrutable reasons. Rather than electing, that is, choosing some for life based on His foreknowledge of them saying "yes" to His offer of forgiveness and mercy, God's choice of them made them say yes (see below under "Irresistible Grace"). Limited Atonement: According to this belief, Jesus' sacrificial death was only to atone for the sins of the elect, not all humanity. What has been said above and John 3:16-17 and 1 John 2:2 are sufficient answer to this. Truly, Jesus "is the propitiation for our sins, and not only our sins, but those of the whole world" and any attempt to deny this is sinful. This is another doctrine which is heartily rejected by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The liturgy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer makes the orthodox doctrine quite plain in its statement that Jesus "hath taken away the sin of the world" in one of the Prefaces to the Sanctus and in the final paragraph of Article XVII where God's promises of salvation are said to be "generally set forth", that is, universally offered to all people. The next sentence of the Article condemns a view held by some (Anabaptist) Protestants at the time that God's universal will to save revealed in the Bible (1 Timothy 2:4) could be overruled by a more fundamental "secret will". Of course, the benefits of the atoning Sacrifice can be rejected by hard, impenitent and ungrateful hearts, but they are available to all just the same. Irresistible Grace and Preservation of the Elect: "Once saved, always saved." If a person has truly received the grace of Christ and ever had real, saving faith, they can not possibly fall away permanently from this state, but only stumble briefly. Eternal life is supposedly absolutely assured because God's grace does not merely enable men and women to say "yes" to God, it makes them do so irresistibly. God "flicks the switch" of peoples' wills, so to speak, by his omnipotence. True Christians who fall into serious sin will certainly repent and be restored before death and divine judgement, and, indeed, cannot ever fall completely away from grace according to Chapter XVII of the Westminster Confession. This doctrinal system is not only unbiblical, as a complete entity it is contrary to what was taught by theologians of the Church in every age before the Reformation. And many Calvinists freely acknowledge this! Of course, they claim that "New Testament" Christians of the First Century were taught Calvinist theology by St Paul, but also believe Paul's distinctive insights were then largely lost for centuries, with the partial exception of St Augustine, only to be mostly regained with Luther and completely regained with Calvin. The fact is that, if Calvin and his followers are right, the vast majority of followers of Christ throughout history have been in fundamental doctrinal error, and the Church as a whole lost Gospel-truth for about one and a half millennia! (This belief is defended in under the heading The Church at Times Appears to be Extinct in Chapter 17 of The Second Helvetic Confession.) This thinking is difficult to distinguish from that of the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Christadelphians, who would just add a couple of centuries to how long "true" Christianity was lost. The picture of God that Calvinism seems to portray is that of an arbitrary and heartless tyrant, with its image of Man giving the impression of a demon with flesh. It is these images that have been rejected by many people who thought they were rejecting Christianity. And this is sad. Terribly sad.
But the Scriptures recognise and commend genuine goodness in non-Christians. Read Acts 10:1-4 and Acts 28:2. See also Romans 2:14-15. Romans 3:10 onwards taken literally could support Total Depravity, but these are quotations from Old Testament poetry! Clearly, where literal interpretation would cause conflicts, it is reasonable to interpret the prose literally and the poetic genre as partly hyperbole: especially since exaggeration is a common Jewish literary device.
The teaching of the Church is that while "the entire" human nature has been "changed for the worse" by sin (to quote the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, Fifth Session), something of the image of God still remains in it and a real though fatally "weakened" free will (Sixth Session). The Church does not deny the possibility of good works from good motives in non-Christians, but it does teach that all works of love done without the Holy Spirit's inspiration are not as they ought to be (Council of Trent, Canons 2 & 3 concerning Justification). This is because they are drawn from the corrupted nature in man and so have at their base an attitude of rebellion (Articles IX & XIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England: see note at bottom of page).
Any sincerely good act, whether performed by a Christian or non-Christian, must proceed from the grace (gift) of God because "[e]very good and perfect gift is from above" (James 1:17) and Jesus is the "true light that gives light to every man" (John 1:9). It needs to be remembered that God's grace can exist in the unconverted. Indeed, it must, or conversion could never occur!
Ironically, although there may be genuine good in people, as long as they deliberately refuse to acknowledge its true source, God, and claim implicitly the credit for themselves they undermine both the goodness and its connection to them as persons. Thus genuine goodness is "cut off at the roots" in the final analysis and partakes of the same rebellious nature as sinful acts (see below). However, if through repentance and faith they acknowledge the true source of their goodness, it can truly become theirs!
NOTE: Although St Augustine and one local Council in the ancient Western Church did teach a doctrine of Total Depravity, this teaching never commended itself to the Church Universal, especially in the East. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles seem to assert that all non-Christian human acts are actually sins in Article XIII, but it in fact says they have the "nature of sin" (ratio peccati in the original Latin; meaning having the same principles/sources/relationships or mode of activity as sin), a vaguer phrase (used in Article IX as well) than the description of Calvinist documents, "true and proper sins". Also, the Article makes it clear it refers to works before not only justification but before any influence or "inspiration" from God. Indeed, a consistent succession of Anglican Bishops and theologians have explicitly rejected the Calvinist approach in this matter.
But the Bible teaches that while all the initiative in salvation comes from God and his choices and actions, a person's response to this determines whether they are saved. God's "final" choice depends in some sense on this response, for the Paul specifically says "those God foreknew he also predestined ... those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified" (Romans 8:29-30). Some claim that God's foreknowledge is in no way passive observation, but an active choice, making it identical to predestination or election: in other words, "foreknew" and "predestined" are two different ways of God saying "I choose you to have eternal life". But this effectively seems to make the above quote from Romans ridiculous, as none of the other terms are synonyms, and if they were, it would make the statement superfluous. Also, the term "foreknew" is dangerously ambiguous if Paul wants to rule out God's choice being conditioned on humans' free will choices. Importantly, St Peter confirms the idea that election depends on foreknowledge even more directly when he states Christians "have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:2).
Other indications that a person's response to previous 'God-influences' in their life "conditions" their destiny and God's election include the story of Cornelius' conversion already referred to (see Acts 10, especially verses 4 and 34-35) and Jesus' Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:5-15). This parable and John 3:21 make clear that whether the "light" of the Word of God results in an accepting response depends on the state of the person before the invitation to "come into the light".
However, it is true that even this state is made possible (not forced upon people) by the previous grace of God, as is made clear in many places, including the rest of 1 Peter 1:2 partly quoted above, where the work of the Holy Spirit is shown to be the means of God bringing His choice to fruition. The thing to remember is that God's offer of grace is a real one which He truly wants all to accept, as proven by Romans 11:32 and 1 Timothy 2:4. People who try and use Romans 9 to prove unconditional election to eternal life need to remember how Paul finishes this discussion in chapter 11!
It should be noted that the Eastern Orthodox have authoritative documents (e.g., The Confession of Dositheus) officially condemning unconditional election and its double predestination. In doing this they reflect the teaching of the early Church Fathers. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England declare that God's predestining is according to a "counsel secret to us" rather than denying it has any regard to the nature or potential nature of the human object or his or her future choices. This allows room for the undeniably mysterious aspect of God's grace and how it is distributed.
In reality, Romans 11:22-23 makes it clear that it is conditional (note the "if") and up to us whether we remain in the grace of God ("continue in his kindness") and that God will "cut off" believers who don't! The Church has always taught that Christians must "work out their salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12) because it was possible for the people of God to refuse or abuse God's grace and miss the heavenly reward (see also Matthew 23:37, Mark 4:19, 2 Corinthians 6:1, Galatians 5:4). Also, Catholic theologians have noted the existence of grace which is "sufficient" to enable our "yes" to God, but not automatically effectual. Article XVII, previously referred to, simply says the Elect "through Grace obey the calling" of God to salvation, which is compatible with Catholic doctrine that God's grace is necessary to enable our positive response, but stops short of Calvinist talk of irresistible grace. More to the point, Article XVI states that Christians can "depart from grace" and that they "may" be restored. Calvinists tried in the past to change this "may" to "must" but were unsuccessful.
Note
Although the Thirty-Nine Articles have no particular authority in the Anglican Catholic Church, they are a useful indication of the historic refusal of Anglicanism to be bound by false Calvinist dogmas. Their deliberately ambiguous nature in a number of areas limits their generic usefulness. They were an attempt to allow the Church of England to take in all orthodox Christians of good will, excluding only those committed to Papal Supremacy, mediaeval corruptions or extreme Protestant positions.