When I began reading Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, my goals were to become more clear on what he actually taught (as opposed to what others taught in his name), to find out whether I agreed with him, and to see what I could learn from him. Over several months I made my way …
Continue reading The Christian Life: a Challenge that Ends in Glory
Over the past year I have been especially dedicated to the task of learning the differences in the systems known as Calvinism and Arminianism, and in discovering where on that spectrum I fall. This task has prompted me to read not only the works of contemporary authors on the subjects, but also those of Calvin …
Continue reading Augustine on Free Will, Grace, and Perseverance
Calvin and Arminius are well known for their views on predestination, but I would argue that they cared less about that subject than they did about defending particular attributes of God’s nature which they felt were at risk of being overlooked, under-appreciated, or misrepresented. The attributes they sought to defend informed their arguments concerning predestination …
Continue reading God’s Sovereignty, God’s Goodness, and the Fall of Man
I first encountered the doctrine of predestination as described by Jacob Arminius in his “Public Disputations”, which opened his collected writings in Arminius Speaks: Essential Writings on Predestination, Free Will, and the Nature of God. After that first encounter, I honestly couldn’t detect any difference between his view and Calvin's. As I continued to read through …
I began reading Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (a translation of the 1541 French edition) in order to understand his own perspective on what we know as the Calvinism vs Arminianism debate. I knew that Arminius actually came later, but I wanted to see what undergirded Calvin’s theology and how he reasoned against those …
Continue reading Not Calvin vs. Arminius, but Calvin vs. the Papists
I decided a few months ago to dive head first into the works of John Calvin and Jacob Arminius with the hope of finally figuring out where I land on the spectrum between these two Reformers. I have been wrestling through the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate over the past several years, never, as of yet, …
Continue reading A study of Calvin and Arminius, My Motivations and Initial Thoughts
I have been struggling to understand some things around the nature of Salvation, God’s disposition toward people, the means by which people are saved, the possibility of apostasy, and other things of that nature. Having just read or listened through Romans, Ephesians, Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, and 1 John, I want to try …
Continue reading Wrestling with the Concepts of Election and Apostasy
Are you someone who wants to increase your depth of understanding of the Bible? Are you ready to go beyond just reading and start doing Bible study? Do you want to understand what is actually going on in some of the strange passages of your Bible that most people are afraid to talk about or lack depth of knowledge to address? Do you want to have a better understanding about what was in the minds of the Israelites written to and about in the Old Testament or those who wrote the Old and New Testament? In this post I discuss what has helped me to grow in my personal Bible study.
The nation of Israel was in exile.1 They had their temple but were under the sovereignty of a pagan nation that did not know, nor respect, their God, Yahweh. Over 500 years earlier during the reign of the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, the tribes of Benjamin and Judah returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple …
Continue reading Restoration for a Nation in Exile and a World without Hope
I have been considering for a while the idea of starting some sort of blog, and I am finally taking the first step in that direction. I don't have any expectations of grandeur at this point. I am just taking a baby step in the direction that I think I should be moving. I spend …
