Late last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon made a somewhat unlikely appearance at the biennial Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College here. The author of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” (2007) — in which the protagonist discovers that an evangelical cabal in the U.S. has launched a holy war between Muslims and Jews in Israel in order to hasten the Second Coming — found himself addressing a crowd of devoted Christians.
In some ways, the Dutch Reformed Calvin College is as homogeneous as the names of its professors (many of which end in -inga, and -einstra). Catholics are not allowed to teach there; neither are members of most other Protestant denominations. Faculty members are required to sign three confessional creeds — the Heidelberg Confession, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dordt — which include the doctrines of predestination (God has predetermined all events) and election (God has chosen some to be saved from eternal damnation and others not).
One could speculate that adherence to these doctrines could foster a certain apathy toward matters in the outside world. (“I can’t do anything to change the course of events, so why bother?”) But there is another major theological tenet that the folks at Calvin hold dear: the belief that the Gospel not only saves souls upon death but redeems minds and bodies in the here and now.