New Calvinists claimed to find in sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin and later Puritan scholars a meatier Christianity that would serve as an antidote to a “softer” evangelicalism. Suppressing the emotive side of evangelical revivalism, they emphasized the existence of hell and the wrath of God, which required Jesus’ substitutionary atonement, his bloody death on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins. Theirs was a properly masculine theology, the story of a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his own Son.
