PONDERING DOUGLAS STUART’S JOHN OF JOHN

Calvinism is often misunderstood—even by Calvinists. Consider Douglas Stuart’s new novel, John of John (2026), set on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. Famous for its tweeds with their intricate combinations of natural colors, Harris is a hard, stony place. The local crofters eke out a living raising sheep and weaving wool by hand. In this hard place, they serve a hard Calvinist God. Many are Wee Wee Frees, members of the Free Presbyterian Church, a small stubborn breakoff from the Free Church of Scotland. In these churches the parishioners sit in strict order. As Stuart describes it:

All the senior church men sat at the front with their families. Behind them were the Converted, a smattering of those who had gone forward and declared their belief in Jesus. Behind them sat the Unsaved. 

At communion, only the saved go forward. John, father of John-Callum, known familiarly as Cal (the John of John in the novel), is among the converted. When he goes forward for communion, he leaves his son behind. Stuart describes the scene:

John had fallen on Jesus’s mercy the year after Cal’s mother had left. Cal was about nine or ten at the time, and all John could remember of the Communion ritual was the fencing off of the Saved. He heard the minister tell the confirmed to leave behind those who were dear to them, that there was now a light around them while the unconfirmed remained in the dark. “You!” he bellowed, “you who are predestined to be saved must leave behind your wife or husband, your sons and your daughters.” To hear it said out loud, to see his son on the far side of the line and separate from him, had terrified him, and sensing the same fear in Cal, he mouthed, “Don’t worry. . .” Later that night, after he read to him, John lay beside Cal and held him. He promised him that he would never in this life leave him, never, and before salvation came he would be sure Cal could follow (page 103).

In this story we find both implacable hardness and great tenderness. John is pulled one way by God, another by his young son. 

Ponder that for a moment—the intersection of the divine and the human, as if they were opposed to each other. The problem in the novel is that the divine keeps intruding into the human, the severity of God coming between father and son, lover and beloved, family and family. But Stuart does not write to condemn; he means to include both things: the tenderness and the severity. He says of the Free Presbyterians in a recent interview, “These are gentle, family-focused, community-minded, kind, generous people, who believe in a very hard path to God.” The problem is that the “hard path to God” becomes not just a hard path to God but a hard God, an unfeeling, unloving God. In Stuart’s John of John, the members of the community cannot find their way to love those they love.

Call this the Calvinist temptation. By calling it temptation, I mean to say that it gets Calvinism wrong. Calvinism does tend in this direction. It’s why when we hear that these hard islanders were Calvinists, we are not surprised. I have written—not gladly but often—about the ways that people who claim to be strict Calvinists use God as an excuse for cruelty to others. Too readily this theology becomes the religion of “I’m doing this for your own good.” It warns of the impending fires of hell as a way of controlling people’s lives. But at the heart of Calvinism is a faith poised on a knife’s edge between severity and tenderness, and embracing both. 

At its heart Calvinism is a deep distrust—distrust not in God but in ourselves. Distrust in any form of pampering sentiment. Distrust in one’s own accomplishments. Distrust in human hierarchies of any and every kind. And above all, distrust in religion. 

This is the core significance of the doctrine of election. If the elect of God are elect only for God’s own reasons—if no one can determine one’s own election—then all our justifications, our elevator speech for why we are the right kind of people, comes to nothing. We stand with everyone else, with the highest of the high and the lowest of the low, nothing to recommend any of us. We are cast simply and utterly on the grace of God.

The radical nature of this core Calvinist thought often gets lost in the anxiety to prove that we—members in good standing of the right kind of church—are, must be, the elect. Surely, we belong. In this conversation about eternal assurance, the idea that in the end we can tell who is elect and who isn’t slips in from the side, and undermines the central idea of election, that salvation is God’s business and not our own. Take, for example, this paragraph from the Westminster Confession:

The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men attending the will of God revealed in his Word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election. So shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God; and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the gospel. (Westminster Confession III, 8; my italics)

In this, the Westminster divines wanted to assure the faithful that they were the elect. No need to worry themselves about it. But this was to give away the whole point. If “attending to the will of God revealed in his Word, and unyielding obedience thereunto” is assurance of one’s election, then we know how to get it. We know that good Presbyterians can claim to be among the elect, and—this is just as important—we know that those seated in the back pews, those who have never conformed to the requirements of sound religion, have thereby marked themselves as unworthy of God’s election. 

All of which brings us back to the scene from Douglas Stuart’s John of John with which I began. The setting seems to be John’s first communion after he professes his faith. As he comes forward, newly a single parent, now among the faithful, the minister tells them that they are the elect. They are bathed in light, he says. And those who cower in the back pews remain in the darkness. Including his son, Cal.

There is a hardness in this. It’s religion as anticipatory schadenfreude. A couple of decades ago I noted the arrival in the conservative Calvinist denomination in which I grew up a cadre of young pastors who seemed positively to delight in hell. Not for them, of course, but for others. One day, they seemed to think, the scofflaws who now populate our culture will get theirs. We’re marching to Zion; they, to the fire. We are the elect; they, they the passed over. We are living a hard obedience; they will pay for their disobedience in eternity.

But this is not what Calvinism has in mind by divine election. This is human wishing. This is the desire to impose what we want on God. We are all prone to it. Despite the way that Calvinism drifts into this sort of judgment, the thought that remains stubbornly at the heart of Calvinist piety is that we really don’t know the mind of God. We can’t know. We stand before the holy and just God without a plea. It’s God who chooses, not us—which makes Calvinism the most radically egalitarian of faiths. The severity of the faith is matched by the demand for kindness. None of us can put on airs. The holiest among us is as little holy as any other. Indeed, in the eyes of God those we judge may be our betters. Best not to judge.

Which thought leads to two more thoughts. The first is that our service to God is not a way to curry favor but simply our due. We serve God because serving God is the right thing to do. This service is hard but it is not joyless. Joy lies in the service itself. To do things as they ought to be done is its own reward. There is a deep humility in this faith.

And, second, being equal in the eyes of God, we are called to acknowledge in others what we would have them acknowledge in us, our intrinsic human value. Recently, on an urban trail near where I live, I came upon a man, apparently homeless, seated with his few possessions laid out in front of him on the trail. Judgment leaked out of my impoverished soul. But as I went past, he caught my eye and said, “I like your cap.” It was not what I expected. In that gesture there was something more. It was a small grace. He acknowledged my value, if only the value of a good cap. On the way back, I tipped my cap to him, and he nodded back. I don’t know if the man was a Calvinist, but he seemed to believe what Calvinists believe, that we are all the same before God.

To be sure, this is not the only way to construe the Christian faith, this Calvinist way. And as I said at the beginning, this way of construing the faith is prone to people sliding from a “hard path to God” to a hard God. And for this reason, this faith often—too often—produces hard communities, communities full of judgment and self-righteousness. Nevertheless, at the heart of this radically distrustful faith a possibility can be seen in which faith is a form of humility. It is faith saying, “I don’t know.” It is admitting that the person next to you is your equal in the eyes of God. It is admitting that the person next to you may well be your better. It is the deep conviction that you stand as much in need of grace as anyone else. What holds us together is not who we are but our deep and common need.

This is a brave faith, on the thin edge of truth. One can easily fall off the edge in either direction. It can become despair; it can become self-righteousness. But grasped in its severe simplicity, it offers a way to God and human life that combines a rigorous piety with a capacious kindness. In my own community, I have seen this faith lived out with grace and beauty.

For reminding me of this, I am grateful to Douglas Stuart’s John of John. The people in the novel often get it wrong in ways that I recognize from my own experience, but, even so, the reach of their faith, however distorted by human failings, hovers over the book as a possibility to be grasped.

Clay