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