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To predestination Calvin added such corollary conclusions as "particular redemption" (God's picking and choosing the elect), "moral inability" (the impossibility of doing anything to save oneself), "invincible grace" (the impossibility of doing anything to damn oneself if God has decreed otherwise) and "final perseverance" (the guarantee that all the elect will reach heaven—no matter what).
The School of Christ. On this theology Calvin turned Geneva into a stern city where civic and church rule were one. Everybody had to go to church on Sunday, and heresy was punished by death, as—in some cases—was adultery. Fornication was punished by exile or drowning. In the four years between 1542 and 1546, there were 58 executions and 76 banishments in a city of about 20,000. Yet to those with a taste for it, Geneva under Calvin seemed almost like an earthly outpost of the Kingdom of God. The famed Scottish reformer, John Knox, lived there for three years and called it "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles."
Far from making do-nothing fatalists of men, Calvin's doctrine of the elect attracted millions all over Europe and America and made them dedicated doers. Calvin, who was confident of his own election, found the dreadful doctrine "productive of the most delightful benefit." The same warming certainty of salvation helped the Huguenots stand fast in France; it stiffened the Dutch defending Holland and nourished the Puritanism of
England; it helped John Knox's Kirk become Scotland's established church, and spread through the colonies as Congregationalism in New England and Presbyterianism in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Toward Homogenization. The Presbyterianism of Eugene Carson Blake has come a long way from Geneva. Young America had much to do with the change. Again and again the old-line, hard-shell predestinarians—who believed in expounding the Word on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, confident that the elect would get the message—were successfully challenged by the evangelicals, who felt that the Holy Spirit needed all the help he could get from a good preacher.
In the "Great Awakening" of colonial days, it was the "Old Side" v. the "New Side," and Jonathan Edwards bringing sinners to their trembling knees with detailed word pictures of hell. Edwards and his followers did much to erode Calvinist determinism by interpreting Adam's fall as not laying irremediable guilt upon man, but only an inclination to sin. After the Revolutionary War, it was the "Old School" and the "New School," which subordinated the sterner tenets of the reformed faith to the idea of God's love. The liberalizers won out in the '20s in a battle in which the conservatives began calling themselves fundamentalists.