Moderate Calvinism

Moderate Calvinism (also referred to as Four-point Calvinism) is a variation holding to universal or unlimited aspects within the atonement. Moderate Calvinism involves a re-evaluation of the meaning and implications of the Five Points of Calvinism (TULIP), the Synod of Dordt, and the Calvinist-Arminian debate.
One form of Moderate Calvinism is Amyraldism (named after Moses Amyraut) which drops the limited atonement in favor of an unlimited atonement which says that God has provided Christ's atonement for all alike, but seeing that none would believe on their own, he then elects those whom he will bring to faith in Christ. Some Moderate Calvinists will go further than this, and reject the traditional Calvinist tenets of unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace, yet retain modified versions of total depravity and perseverance of the saints. Because of this, James R. White, the Reformed Baptist apologist and author of The Potter's Freedom has referred to them as "inconsistent Arminians."
Popularised in England by the Reformed pastor Richard Baxter, Amyraldism also gained strong adherence among the Congregationalists and some Presbyterians in the American colonies, during the 17th and 18th centuries. Among the Arminian "General Baptists", some in the late seventeenth century began to moderate their Arminianism. They did so to the point that it changed from a belief in the possibility of apostasy from the Christian life to the unconditional perseverance of the saints. They, like other General Baptists, had always affirmed total depravity. After the shift to unconditional perseverance, they continued to hold to election conditioned on foreseen faith, general (unlimited) atonement, and resistible grace. They articulated this perspective in a confession of faith entitled "The Orthodox Creed" (1689). It is doubtful, however, that these early general-atonement Baptists had any connection with later Moderate Calvinists in the Baptist tradition.
Moderate Calvinism is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon. Some historians argue that Baptists in North America began to soften the hard edges of traditional Calvinism in the nineteenth century. This doctrinal shift coincided with the spread of the Separate Baptist movement and the wide acceptance of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith. Baptist theologians in both the North and South held as strenuous a brand of Calvinism as that of their Princeton Presbyterian colleagues. However, Baptists in the pew, aflame with the fires of frontier revivalism, began to moderate the strict Calvinism of their forebears. Other historians place the erosion of traditional Baptist Calvinism in the early twentieth century with teachers such as E. Y. Mullins and L. R. Scarborough. At any rate, Moderate Calvinism became the majority view among Baptists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many dispensationalists in groups like the Plymouth Brethren and the Bible Church movement also moderated their Calvinism considerably.

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