Specifically, you'll recall that John Brown was a staunch Calvinist. And in reading Reynolds' biography I was educated in how Calvinism operated in Brown's life as he faced hardship, failure, disappointment, and tragedy. We tend to judge theological systems from "the outside" as it were, evaluating it as a set of propositions that strike us as plausible or implausible. But watching theology from "the inside," as a form of coping in the life of the believer, is a very different thing. And that's the education I got reading about John Brown, how Calvinism can function as a coping strategy.
For many of us, from the outside, Calvinism is abhorrent as it claims that all the pains and evils we experience in life are "God's will," a part of "God's plan." We recoil in the face of the suggestion that God wills accidents and cancer diagnoses.
But that's not how John Brown experienced it, and I'm assuming his experience was typical for generations of Calvinists. Brown lost a wife, many children in childbirth, and the killing of his sons. He also experienced acute poverty, business failures, and, of course, the gallows at Harpers Ferry. And in the face of all of this Brown approached it with calm and equanimity. Oh, to be sure, it was a life filled with tears, sorrow and displays of grief. But comfort, courage, and equanimity was found as Brown coped with suffering in the Calvinist belief that God was providentially at work in all things.
Watching this in the biography, it occurred to me that Calvinism, as a coping strategy, was a resource that facilitated resignation and acceptance in the face of negative life events. Calvinism functions as a form of Christian stoicism. Where the stoic philosophers of Greece advised equanimity in the face of fate, the Calvinistic stoics advised equanimity in the face of God's providence.
Linking this to observations I've made before on the blog, one of the reasons we modern Christians have balked at Calvinism is due to how we've grown less stoical over the generations. We are more reactive than our forebears to the existential shocks of suffering and death. Resignation isn't our thing. "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away" doesn't help us cope, the way it helped Job and generations of Jews and Christians. We've lost cultural and personal capacities for stoical acceptance, making Calvinism as a coping strategy difficult to embrace.
What I'm suggesting here is that our aversion to Calvinism isn't theological, it's psychological. For many modern Christians, Calvinism no longer helps us cope.
