Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 13005. The five points of Calvinism are usually met for the first time as an acrostic, TULIP, and I have watched more than one young believer fall in love with the tidiness of it before ever testing it against a Bible. That is the danger of a good system. It answers questions so neatly…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7108 Arminian theology is the other great system in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it is almost as frequently misrepresented as Calvinism. Many who reject Calvinism assume they must therefore be Arminian, and many Calvinists use the word as a synonym for shallow thinking. Neither assumption survives contact with the actual documents. I am…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7096 The Calvinist system is the most influential account of salvation in English-speaking evangelicalism, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately by both its friends and its critics. If we are going to disagree with it, and I do, then we owe it an accurate description first. Caricature is cheap and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07036. The argument between Calvinism and Arminianism has been running for four centuries and shows no sign of tiring, which tells you either that the questions are unanswerable or that they matter enormously. I think it is the second. What is at stake is how God saves, what human beings contribute, for whom Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than with what the Bible does with them. Predestination sounds like fatalism. Foreknowledge sounds like a divine spreadsheet. Neither impression survives an honest look at the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07033. The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame them. Few doctrines have caused more heat, more caricature and more pastoral damage when handled carelessly. Yet the word is in the Bible, it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text actually teaches? I ask this because Scripture does describe God choosing Israel out of all the nations, calling David “a man after his own heart,”…