Oliver D. Crisp Quotes

[John] Calvin's Institutes is often called a summary of Christian piety. You can't say that about many modern works of theology. You can say it of Calvin.

[Calvinistic tradition] has fashioned and shaped my thinking since I was a teenager.

God shows us in Christ what he would have to do if he were to punish us for our sins.

The best Reformed theology isn't just about careful arguments for theologically sophisticated conclusions. It is about how to live the Christian life.

It is often reported that the Five Points of Calvinism are the conceptual hard-core of Reformed thought. That is very misleading. The Five Points supposedly originate with the Synod of Dort in the early seventeenth century. Yet we find important Reformed leaders who were signatories to that documentation who don't think that limited atonement is the right way to think about the scope of Christ's saving work. How can this be? The answer that recent historical theology has thrown up is that the canons of the Synod don't require adherence to the doctrine of limited atonement.

There is no such thing as a stationary tradition. Traditions are always developing, living things.

I think everyone who has an interest in Reformed theology, or just in Christian theology more generally, should read John Calvin Institutes.

For instance, there are many mainstream Reformed theologians that deny the doctrine of "limited" atonement (the "L" in TULIP, the acrostic for the Five Points of Calvinism). These are not thinkers on the margins or troublemakers. They are leaders at the center of Reformed thinking like Bishop John Davenant.

No confession is inerrant; Reformed Christians are supposed to be those who seek to be constantly reformed according to the Word of God - and that includes our confessions as well.

The atonement chapter [from the book Saving Calvinism] shows how there are real riches in Reformed theology that most Christians today have no idea about.

The book [Saving Calvinism] argues in each case that the Reformed tradition is broader and deeper than we might think at first glance - not that there are people on the margins of the tradition saying crazy things we should pay attention to, but rather that there are resources within the "mainstream" so to speak, which give us reason to think that the tradition is nowhere near as doctrinally narrow as the so-called "Five Points of Calvinism" might lead one to believe.

There are constraints on what counts as "Reformed." It's more than a name or a label. It's about belonging to a particular theological stream or tradition, which is shaped in important respects by particular thinkers and their work, particular arguments and ideas, a particular community (especially, particular church communities, denominations, and so on), particular liturgies or ways of worshipping and living out the Christian life, and particular confessions that inform the practices of these communities.

[ Jonathan] Edwards is the person who really made theological determinism a serious option for Reformed thinkers, and the influence his views had in nineteenth century Reformed thought, in the USA and the UK in particular, is enormous.

[John] Calvin is often identified with his account of predestination. Yet that appears in the third book of his Institutes, not the first.

[I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist] but that only goes to underline the point I'm trying to make about the need to broaden our account of the tradition!

How many people in the pews know that [ Jonathan Edwards] is both a founder of evangelicalism and, say, an idealist who denied that the material world exists?

The Reformed tradition at the beginning of the twenty-first century is different as a consequence of this - and different in nontrivial ways. Some may scoff at this, saying that such "developments" don't represent Reformed thought. But by what standard? Perhaps by the Westminster Confession. But this is only one Reformed confession, and it was only ever a subordinate standard.

In the twentieth century the Reformed tradition was developed in several ways including additional confessions (Barmen, the Belhar Confession, the 1967 Confession of the PC(USA), and so on). It was also significantly augmented by the work of important thinkers like Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, Jürgen Moltmann, Emil Brunner, Kathryn Tanner, and so on.

We may think that our tradition is exactly the same as it has always been, but that is an illusion.

[John] Calvin is revered as a thinker of immense importance in Reformed thought, Jonathan Edwards could say in his preface to his treatise on Freedom of the Will that he had derived none of his views from the work of Calvin, though he was willing to be called a "Calvinist" for the sake of convention.

Here is the interesting twist:[McLeod] Campbell came to his views through reading Jonathan Edwards who suggested at one point in his ruminations on the atonement that Christ could have offered up a perfect act of penitence instead of punishment, and that this would have been an acceptable offering suitable to remit our sinfulness.

The book [Saving Calvinism] itself is not recommending that we move the borders, so to speak. It is recommending that we look at what lies within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought.

The alternative of hypothetical universalism, according to which Christ's work is sufficient for all but efficient only for the elect, was alive and well in early Reformed thought. Moreover - and importantly for our purposes - this view was not regarded as an aberration but as a legitimate position that could be taken within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought. But that means that the Five Points aren't the non-negotiable conceptual core of Calvinism after all.

For those interested in Reformed thought more broadly, I'd recommend Peter Leithart's recent book on Reformed Catholicism entitled, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Brazos Press, 2016), as a thought-provoking and stimulating read that should get us all thinking about the future shape of the Church, wherever we come from.

I recommend Doug Sweeney's recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.