Monday, August 10, 2015
Exploring Reformed Faith
CT interview with a book author:
Someday we will learn to quite confusing jerks that misuse ideas with the ideas themselves, but then that would require study, and well....
Calvinism ideas
Why do you think it was important to write Deviant Calvinism?Forgive my cynicism, but Gee. Ya Think?!
I see a lot of misrepresentations of Reformed theology, among people both inside and outside the Reformed tradition. Many people think Reformed theology coalesces around five points or around the soteriological “doctrines of grace” rather than around historic confessions. And I see a lot of Calvinists who aren’t confessional, when in fact the Reformed tradition very much is. If you truly are a Calvinist, then you should be interested in Reformed confessions, I think. And when we look at the confessional tradition, it seems Reformed theology is broader than the more narrow five-point Calvinism.
Also, a number of people outside the Reformed community tend to associate the Reformed tradition with a narrowly dogmatic—in both senses of that term—way of thinking about the Christian faith. And they are rather disparaging about that. But not all of us are narrowly dogmatic. So I thought, Maybe the time has come to make a case for a more irenic, more sanguine, broad approach to the Reformed tradition, because there are great riches in the Reformed tradition that just don’t get reported.
Even though the book is more scholarly than popular, I think it addresses some hot issues in the air at the moment.
Someday we will learn to quite confusing jerks that misuse ideas with the ideas themselves, but then that would require study, and well....
Calvinism ideas
