Unmasking John Calvin’s God With Hamilton’s King George
I watched Hamilton last night for the first time. And I was struck by the parallels in King George’s song “You’ll Be Back” to the Calvinistic view of God.
The lyrics say,
“The price of my love’s not a price that you’re willing to pay…
Now you’re making me mad…
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love…You’re my favorite subject
My sweet, submissive subject
My loyal, royal subject
Forever and ever and ever and ever…I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise
And I’ll love you till my dying days…
Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”
Consider those words from Hamilton in light of these words about the coronavirus from John Piper:
“Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment a thousand times worse…The coronavirus is a merciful wake-up call to be ready for Christ’s return…The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ.”
Or consider King George’s lyrics in light of John Piper’s thoughts on how we should feel about his theology of eternal conscious torment:
“He gets glory because his grace and mercy shine more brightly against the darker backdrop of sin and judgment and wrath, and our worship and our experience of that grace intensifies and deepens because we see we don’t deserve to be where we are.”
Or consider King George’s lyrics in light of this quote from Jonathan Edwards, who is John Piper’s hero:
“The saints are…called upon to rejoice…in seeing the love and tenderness of God towards them, manifested in his severity towards their enemies…this rejoicing will be the fruit of a perfect holiness and conformity to Christ…that the just damnation of the wicked will be an occasion of rejoicing to the saints in glory…to rejoice in seeing his love to them in executing justice on his enemies…for the heavenly inhabitants will know that it is not fit that they should love them, because they will know then, that God has no love to them, nor pity for them.”
The Calvinistic view of God says that God will send the armed battalion of the Coronavirus to remind you of his love, and that God will torture your friends and family in hell forever in order to remind you of his love for you. Sounds an awful lot like King George! In fact, it actually sounds infinitely worse than King George.
If God is merely an infinitely magnified version of King George, then that is not good news. In fact, it’s the worst news imaginable. Of course, when I was a Calvinist, I would’ve said that God gets to be that way because he’s God, and is glorious enough to be that way and still be holy. But who can see the heaving chest of an elderly woman, consider her desperate gulps for air to be the mercy of God, and maintain their humanity? Who can gaze into the eyes of their child, rejoice in them being tortured for eternity because God’s hatred of their child is a reminder of God’s love for them, and maintain their humanity?
The conservative evangelicalism of Together For the Gospel, The Gospel Coalition, the Southern Baptist seminaries, and the Presbyterian Church in America among others today has been fundamentally shaped by the affections that have been formed by John Calvin’s theology as interpreted through the likes of Jonathan Edwards and John Piper. It’s no wonder that the faces of a people so shaped by the theology of lost humanity would look on closed lungs, children in cages, and bleeding or imprisoned black bodies without empathy. It’s no wonder that their hearts come alive with rage at the site of a toppling statue. It’s because the humanity of their hearts has more in common with those stone statues than with the people who have been hurt by the wars and systems that the men represented by those statues waged and built.
Unmasking John Calvin’s God in conservative evangelicalism seems virtually insurmountable because his followers are convinced that they are free in grace and that their theology comes from the Bible and a high view of a sovereign God.
They would have to hear King George’s words as great parallels to their view of God. But the seed of humanity in all of us knows when we watch Hamilton that King George’s character is unhealthy. Perhaps the great unmasking of Calvin’s God won’t come from the pulpit or the classroom, but in those little moments where we glimpse into the mirrors of three minute songs, glance over at our laughing kids, and begin to wonder.