It is the revivalist style of at least some members of the New Calvinism punctuated by constant references to Jonathan Edwards and the rise of charismatic Calvinism that has many Old School Presbyterians concerned. Piper side-stepped the main issue between the two camps: from an Old-School perspective the New Calvinism smacks of the evangelical revivalism of a D. L. Moody, or, more to the point, the baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday (insert Mark Driscoll reference here). Sunday once called the novelist Sinclair Lewis \u201cSatan\u2019s cohort\u201d\u009d in response to Lewis\u2019s 1927 satirical novel Elmer Gantry, whose main character\u201d\u201da hypocritical evangelist\u201d\u201dwas modeled on Sunday\u2019s flamboyant style.<\/p>\n
That older coalition of Congregationalists, Baptists, and New School Presbyterians combined dispensationalism, celebrity revivalism, and fundamentalism\u201d\u201dthe very traits that Old School Presbyterians disliked then and now. It is not without some irony that Piper acknowledged the important role of Westminster Seminary while not even mentioning that it was the epicenter of Old School Presbyterianism with its anti-revivalist and cessationist stance (at the end of his lecture Piper got a laugh when he said, \u201cyou don\u2019t even want to know my eschatology.\u201d\u009d Indeed!).<\/p>\n