He’s 500 years old today, but he’s still hot. Especially for a brand of youthful US-based evangelicals. The 16th-century reformer John Calvin, perhaps unjustly famed for dourness and an elitist doctrine of pre-destination, is enjoying a huge revival in the Protestant world.

Time magazine put The New Calvinism at No 3, in its 2009 list of the Top Ten ideas Changing the World, calling it “ Evangelicalism's latest success story”.

Time points out that "the Calvinist-flavoured ESV Bible" sold out at first printing, and exalting the reformed blog Between Two Worlds as among "cyber-Christendom's hottest links."

A 2007 survey found that 30 per cent of all new pastors who graduate from the influential Southern Baptist Theological Seminary profess themselves Calvinist, and thus subscribers to his five key “doctrines of grace” - the depravity of man (enslaved by sin), unconditional election (God's choice of whom he will save is grounded in mercy not works), limited atonement (Jesus atoned once and for all for sin), irresistible grace (those God chooses to save cannot resist his grace), and perseverance of the saints (those God chooses to save will remain in faith eternally).

But the trend is divisive, inflaming rows in the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest federation of Protestant churches. “Calvinism has generated a lot of interest in recent years in Southern Baptist life,” notes Danny Akin, head of the South Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Unfortunately we have often talked at and not with one another. Unhealthy rhetoric and misrepresentations from all directions have led to confusion and even ill will among brothers and sisters in Christ."

The modern version, propelled by dynamic preachers such as Mark Driscoll in Seattle, and in Minneapolis, John Piper of the Bethlehem Baptist Church, the founder of the Desiring God movement, offers a vision of the abundant love of God in all situations, even the toughest.

Dr W Robert Godfrey, President of Westminster Seminary in California, and the author of John Calvin, Pilgrim and Pastor says Calvin viewed himself primarily not as a theologian but a Christ-centred Biblical pastor. For Calvin, trust in providence was key, meaning that “in the circumstances of our lives our heavenly Father is overseeing and directing all things. Even in the bitter times we can have comfort in the advancement of his kingdom.” Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, asserts that any Christian seeking to define God biblically will be “drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist.”

Such back-to-Bible basics strongly appeal to a generation broken by “divorce, drugs or sexual temptation,” claims Collin Hansen, the youngest religion editor at the magazine and website Christianity Today.

His book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists, was the result of his two-year quest to discover whether the trend for Reformed theology he had spotted with College contemporaries was a one-off or part of larger movement. After all Yale University had recently published a major biography of the popular 18th-century Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, a “number of Calvinists” were occupying top positions in US seminaries, preachers like Piper sold millions of books and had vast following at events like the student-based evangelical “Passion Conference”. In “locales as diverse as Birmingham, Alabama and New Haven, Connecticut,” he set out to discover “what makes today’s young evangelicals tick,” and thus the shape of tomorrow’s Church.

He found a generation “weary of churches that seek to entertain rather than teach, longing after the true meat of the Word” and Calvinist pastors concerned at evangelical mega-churches seemingly modelled on businesses.

However, not all evangelicals are happy with the New Calvinist trend. Hansen interviewed Steve Lemke, the provost of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, who in a 2005 talk on the future of Southern Baptists asserted that Calvinism was "potentially the most explosive and divisive issue facing us in the near future. It has already been an issue that has split literally dozens of churches, and it holds the potential to split the entire convention."

His concern was essentially that Calvinist churches are not committed to evangelism. Why bother, if God has already selected those who will be saved? "For many people, if they're convinced that God has already elected those who will be elect … I don't see how humanly speaking that can't temper your passion, because you know you're not that crucial to the process," Lemke explains.

Whatever your take, it’s a debate that’s here to stay