Experiential Calvinism Part 2

Archibald Alexander
(Otis, Bass, 1784-1861. (artist), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

The error of faing to get to know the Bible

The first area where the Sadducees were in error was in their failure to read their Bibles properly. They made at least two particular errors in regard to the Bible.

First, they only accepted the Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, as being God's Word. They rejected the prophets and the writings that form the rest of the Old Testament.

Then, even the parts of the Bible that they accepted, they did not read anywhere near carefully enough. Jesus highlights the phrase I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, a phrase that comes up many times and that the Sadducees would have known well. However, they had never really thought about it. As Jesus points out, if God is the God not only of Jacob but also of Isaac and Abraham who were dead before Jacob then he is the God of … the living … not the dead. They were badly mistaken!

So first of all, we must accept the whole of the Bible – not just the Books of Moses but the rest of the Old Testament too; not just the Old Testament but also the New. Not just the Gospels but the rest of the New Testament too.

The Bible is really a whole library of books and it is all important. Everywhere you look you will find something about Jesus in it and so, bit by bit, we need to get to know this library and understand what these books say about Jesus. It will not come overnight. It needs to be worked at.

And then do not make the mistake of failing to read it with great care.

To give examples. In the same chapter (Mark 12:36, 37) Jesus quotes Psalm 110 and says David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared: "'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet."' He then says David himself calls him 'Lord.' How then can he be his son? … He wants people to think about how Messiah can be David's son and his Lord.

In his first letter Peter, speaking to wives, notes that (1 Peter 3:6) Sarah … obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. He then says to wives You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. You would have to read Genesis fairly carefully to spot that Sarah called Abraham Lord and then to consider the implications.

In Hebrews 8:13 the writer refers to Jeremiah 31:31 where it speaks of God making a new covenant. He says By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

In Galatians 3:16 Paul says The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ. So Paul is drawing attention to just one letter difference to make a point.

C H Spurgeon once said of John Bunyan “Prick him anywhere, his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God.”1 We all need to get the Bible into our heads so that it shapes our thinking and our words and actions too.

The error of failing to reckon with the power of God

The other thing Jesus says about the Sadducees is that they are in error not only because they did not know the Scriptures but also because they failed to reckon with the power of God.

Avoiding error is not simply a matter of getting a Bible and reading it. You see that, for example, with cults such as the so called Jehovah's Witnesses or Christadelphians. They love their Bible studies, as they call them, but have no idea of God's power. Similarly, there are academics with a very good working knowledge of the Bible but no idea of God's power in their lives.2

Yet it is something absolutely vital to know. For example, it is important to know God's power to convert a person. Many deny it but it is true that God has power to transform a person's life, to turn it around so that it can fairly be said they are born again; they are new people in Christ.

The most famous conversion is that of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. He is suddenly confronted by Jesus himself and powerfully converted. Similar things have gone on ever since. In recent years conversions have included those of Mosab Hassan Yousef, a former terrorist whose father co-founded Hamas in Palestine; Bilquis Sheikh, a Pakistani Muslim; Helen Shapiro the singer, brought up in London's east end in a Jewish family; Guillaume Bignon, who grew up as an atheist in France;3 American Becket Cook who had been a practising homosexual. He wrote

It wasn’t about simply changing my mind, but about changing my mind and heart. I can’t explain all the mechanics of this radical transformation. I just know that no one can be in the very presence of the living God and remain the same.4

God's power is not something only experienced in conversion. It goes on sanctifying the believer and making them more and more holy. Prayer, perhaps, is an obvious example of where God's power is known in a person's life. In many cases, people have prayed and quite remarkable answers have been known. People have been healed, situations have been transformed. Other example would be in the areas of conviction, joy in suffering and assurance. In all sorts of ways real Christians are those who daily experience God's power in their lives.

This is the thing to keep in mind – keep reading the Bible and never forget God's power. Pray for it in your life. Have a head full of the Bible and its great doctrines and a heart full of love to God as you trust in his power. That is the sort of Experiential Calvinism the Bible encourages.5

1 See C H Spurgeon, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Volume 45, Luke 23:46, June 25, UK, 1882

2 The late Eta Linneman describes how, as a theologian, she was taught to study the Bible “as if there were no God”. She says “Although it can happen that when you study the Bible like that, you might experience something of him, in general, you have not the slightest chance of finding God this wa. … If you decide to study as if there were no God, you will not meet him.” https://gracevalley.org/teaching/eta-linnemann-testimony/ Accessed November 2025.

3 Mosab Hassan Yousef, R Brackin, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, USA, 2011; Bilquis Sheikh, R H Schneider, I Dared to Call Him Father: The Miraculous Story of a Muslim Woman's Encounter with God, USA, 2003; Helen Shapiro, Wendy Green, Walking back to happiness, an autobiography, UK, 1994; Guillaume Bignon, Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove the Christian Faith, USA, 2022,

4 Becket Cook, A Change of Affection: A Gay Man's Incredible Story of Redemption, USA, 2019

5 Helpful books on Christian experience include Archibald Alexander's masterful Thoughts on Religious experience, Banner of Truth reprint 1968 and two little books by the late Erroll Hulse, The Believer's Experience: maintaining the balance been experience and truth, UK, 1977 and Crisis experiences, UK, 1984.

Experiential Calvinism Part 1

Gilead Calvinistic Methodist Chapel by N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

This article first appeared in The Banner of Truth Magazine

Experiential Calvinism – Knowing the Bible and the Power of God

The biggest Protestant grouping in Wales in the 19th century was the Calvinistic Methodists, in Welsh, Methodistiaeth or more rarely Trefnyddion Calfinaidd. (Calvinist as opposed to Wesleyan, as Arminian Methodists are styled in Wales.) It was a grouping that Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones knew well. By his time, it was no longer in its heyday but he was happy to identify as a Calvinistic Methodist. Far from being the oxymoron some consider it, for him, it neatly summed up what he sought to promote - sound theology allied to deep Christian experience of God.

He once said that he spent half his time urging Christians to study doctrine and the other half telling them that doctrine is not enough. Speaking once about Calvinistic Methodist preacher and hymn writer William Williams, he said

My argument is, that cold, sad, mournful, depressing Calvinism is not Calvinism at all. It is a caricature; something has gone wrong somewhere. It is mere intellectualism and philosophy. Calvinism leads to feeling, to passion, to warmth, to praise, to thanksgiving. Look at Paul, the greatest of them all. We should not talk about 'Calvinism'; it is Paul's teaching. He tells us that he wept. He preached with tears. Do you? When did we last weep over these matters? When did we last shed tears? When have we shown the feeling and the passion that he shows? Paul could not control himself, he got carried away. Look at his mighty climaxes; look at the way in which he rises to the heavens and is 'lost in wonder, tore, and praise'.1

In a similar way, like others, I happily identify as a Reformed Baptist. The word Reformed there is interchangeable with Calvinistic and the word Baptist points not simply to a certain view of baptism but also to a very practical, enthusiastic and evangelistic approach to Christian living. Some do not like the name but, for others, it sums up well where we stand.

Experiential Calvinism

Similar to these terms is Experiential Calvinist, which has become popular in some circles in more recent years,2 overtaking the experimental religion spoken of by former generations, a phrase that someone like Jonathan Edwards would have readily used.3 The phrase usefully asserts that, as to doctrine, this person is a Calvinist, someone committed to the doctrines of grace, but not in a cold or merely theoretical way but warmly and passionately, in an experimental or experiential way.

In the history of the church, there have been professing Christians convinced that if you are going to be a Christian and live for God's glory, you must be experiential. 2 Timothy 3:5 speaks of people who Christians must avoid, as those with a form of godliness but who deny its power (my emphasis). Other Scriptures point to the same phenomenon.4 Such people do not want to be like that. They want to experience God in their lives. However, too often such people have sat light to what the Bible says and so have strayed into unbiblical ways of thinking and acting.

In many ways, that is the story of the Quakers. They call themselves the Society of friends but long ago gained the nickname Quaker as, in the early days, many would literally quake or shake as they worshipped God. Some extraordinary things happened among the Quakers in the early days but they drifted further and further from the Bible and it must be very rare today to find someone who is who is both a Quaker and a real believer. The Charismatic movement has had a similar, though less disastrous, trajectory. It is another example of a movement where the emphasis on Christian experience can become more important than what the Bible actually teaches.

It is very important to seek real Christian experience but it is important to always keep coming back to the Bible so that our thinking and life are shaped by it. The Bible must interpret our experience – not the other way round.

Erroll Hulse has written

A clear line of division can be drawn between those who insist that the Bible must be the basis by which all spiritual experience is tested and those who regard experience as pre-eminent and resist the tests of Scripture. Is the Word our authority, or is spiritual experience our authority? The Puritans were strong in the area of knowing God by heart experience but they sought to test everything by Scripture. We do well to follow their example.5

Anglican Bishop Handley Moule was making a similar point when he quoted someone warning against “an untheological devotion”. Moule underlines how, in Colossians, Paul asks for “just these ‘theological’ blessings … for a salvation nobly ‘theological.’” Moule says, “He prays that they may not only be warm and earnest, but may know profoundly the reason of their hope.”6

Unlike those for whom experience is everything for some the need to conform to the Bible has become so important that they have almost forgotten about the importance of Christian experience. It is easy to fall into and is probably the bigger danger for those who know their Bibles well.

The question is sometimes asked whether it is better for a soccer player to be able to kick with their right foot or their left? Of course, it is best if they can kick with both. At all levels, the two footed player is more versatile, more unpredictable and better balanced all round.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that the Bible is enough. Keep coming back to it so that your thinking and life is shaped by it but also look for real Christian experience in your life. The Bible is to be lived out not just held in our heads.

To quote Lloyd-Jones again, “As theology is ultimately the knowledge of God, the more theology I know, the more it should drive me to seek to know God.”7 Knowing God is what it is all about not just knowing about God or what is in the Bible. A quotation often attributed to Puritan John Owen says

The foundation of true holiness and true Christian worship is the doctrine of the gospel, what we are to believe. So when Christian doctrine is neglected, forsaken, or corrupted, true holiness and worship will also be neglected, forsaken, and corrupted.8

There is a famous line in a hymn by Joseph Hart that says it well

True religion’s more than notion;

Something must be known and felt.

A biblical idea

An obvious question for experiential Calvinists is whether this is a biblical idea. It certainly is. 2 Timothy 3:16, 17 and Hebrews 4:12 would certainly point in that direction but Mark 12:24 is a clincher. It says Jesus replied, Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? He is speaking to a group of people called Sadducees. In Acts 23:28 we read that they claimed there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits, unlike the Pharisees who believed all these things.

Mark tells how some Sadducees came to Jesus in the week before his death in Jerusalem and told him a rather ridiculous story. It is about a woman who marries a man who dies. There are no children so the man's brother is obliged to marry the widow, the first child they have then counting as his dead brother's child. The woman remarries but the second brother also dies with no children and, in fact, the woman marries a whole series of seven brothers, all of whom die without issue! Eventually, the woman herself dies.

A crazy story, not real and unlikely to happen but its purpose is to ridicule an idea. The Sadducees, the great sceptics of their day, want to make fun of the whole idea of the afterlife, the resurrection, the idea that everyone is raised up at the end of time and goes to heaven or hell. If it is true, they argue, then in this case there is a real problem. At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her? (Mark 12:2

Jesus shows that, in fact, the question they thought so very clever has no power in fact and is rather silly. He explains (12:25) When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. The world to come is a very different one. In that place and time, all believers will be brothers and sisters, There will be no marriage or any such thing.

Jesus adds that if the Sadducees had read their Bibles properly, they would have avoided this mistake. He points out how in the Book of Moses, that is in the first five books of the Bible which they agreed was inspired (Exodus actually) in the account of the burning bush ... God said to him to Moses, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? Jesus concludes He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken! This is God's character – he is the living God, the great I am.

This is the context for Mark 12:24 and its assertion that the Sadducees are in error because they do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. Jesus could have said more, no doubt, but he says these two failures are at the heart of where the Sadducees have gone wrong. Many others make the same sort of mistake.

1 See the 1968 lecture William Williams and Welsh Calvinistic Methodism in Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans, their origins and successors, Banner of Truth Trust, 1987.

2 See Ian Hamilton, What Is Experiential Calvinism? USA, 2015, booklet.

3 See for example Jonathan Edwards, The Treatise on Religious Affections, 1824, USA

4 See Isaiah 2:13, 48:1, 2, 58:1-13; Ezek 33:3032; Matt 7:15, 23:27, 28; Rom 2:20-24, 1 Tim 5:8; Titus 1:16

5 Erroll Hulse, Who are the Puritans?, UK, 2000. See also, Phil Johnson, “For decades, evangelicals have been taught both by precept and by example, that experience is the lens through which we should evaluate the Bible and its doctrines. But that’s exactly backwards. We need to scrutinise and evaluate our experience in the light of God’s Word. … if we say we look to Scripture as the supreme and sufficient test of all truth claims, then Scripture must be the judge of our experience and not vice versa … I think the typical evangelical today is prone to get it exactly backwards. If Scripture doesn’t jive with their experience, they’ll reinterpret the passage; or more often, perhaps, they simply ignore it. And in effect then, their whole religion is shaped by experience; and, in fact, that is paganism’s epistemology. It is a form of paganism.” https:// www.gty.org/conferences/session/TM19-2/scripture-vs-human-experience-phil-johnson, accessed November 2025

6 H C G Moule, The Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, UK, 1898, He continues by saying that in the context, Paul's prayer is no untimely message for us. In many quarters of our Christendom nothing is more in fashion than “an untheological devotion.” “The religious sentiment” is regarded far and wide as a thing which can live and be healthy with a very minimum of revelation, and with an almost nil of reasoned doctrine; above all of the doctrine of a divine Christ, an atoning Cross, and a rescue from “the authority of the darkness.” But such “sentiment,” however warm, has no ultimate “last” in it. Under very moderate pressure from fashions of thought, and from attractive personalities, it is ready to go as far as possible from the ground on which alone the world, the flesh, and the devil can be really met.

7 D M Lloyd-Jones, The Christian Soldier: An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10-20, Banner of Truth, 1977, 342

8 See for example The New Encyclopedia of Christian Quotations, USA, 2000