David Bentley Hart gets Calvin badly askew

David Bentley Hart restates the view (popular with the Radical Orthodox) which traces the decline of Western Christianity to the nominalism of the medieval period: when God became a kind of pure will. He sees Calvin as the moment when that poisoned stream becomes a flood:

...this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became posible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty - as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism... p. 134

This is a very nasty (and inaccurate) reading of Calvin, for whom God is primarily the life-giving and tender Father of his creation, and and loving redeemer of his people. This thought permeates the Institutes, rather than the pure omnipotent will of the scholastics. Again, the mode and style of Calvin's work makes all the difference - something you would think Hart would be hip to.