That is the great contribution of Reformed thinking to the Christian church: theology for a life well-lived.
[John Calvin's] treatment of the person and work of Christ, of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, of prayer and liturgy, of the sacraments, and of the way in which we have an in-built sense of the divine that we suppress to our great sorrow - these are all immense contributions to Christian thought. The same could be said of his commentaries, which are still regularly consulted by biblical critics today.
Reading [John] Calvin is a breath of fresh air.
One of the things we in the Reformed tradition are very good at is writing doctrinal theology!
[John Calvin's] Humanist training makes him an excellent writer. What is more, he is as relevant today as he was 500 years ago.
[John Calvin] writes clearly, directly, without artifice, and gets straight to the practical heart of the matter.
For those who have only ever read about [John] Calvin, reading the man himself is an invigorating experience.
What I am trying to argue here [Save Calvinism] and in other works before this one is that the Reformed tradition as I have characterized it is much broader and richer than many of us today imagine. It is not just about "Five Points," and it was never just about [John ] Calvin's thought.
Reformed theology belongs to this confessional tradition, and Reformed theologians and churches continue to write confessions even today.
To my mind [ Jonathan Edwards] is an interesting figure because he is both a canonical Reformed thinker, and yet also someone that pushed the envelope in a number of key areas of theology.
[ Jonathan] Edwards is one of my heroes. I've learned much from him over the years.
[Jonathan] Edwards definitely shows up in the book [Saving Calvinism]. He appears as one of the interlocutors in the chapter on free will, the other being the Southern Presbyterian theologian John Girardeau.
These days I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist, but I don't really think my views do deviate from the Reformed tradition, though in some respects they may represent views that are not as popular now as they once were, or that may represent a minority report in the tradition.
I don't really have a lot of interns, although I do now use Research Assistants to help me compile indexes when that is necessary.
Sometimes we can lose the wood for the trees. Some specific issues dealt with in the book [Saving Calvinism]: the scope of election (who is saved?); the nature of the atonement (do we have to hold to penal substitution if we're Reformed?); the scope of the atonement (for whom did Christ die?); whether we have to hold to some sort of theological determinism (God ordains all that comes to pass).
In many ways the book [Saving Calvinism] is trying to argue for a more popular audience things I've said in some more scholarly works, namely, that the Reformed tradition is broader and more variegated than is often reported today, and that we need to recapture something of this in order that we don't end up unnecessarily narrow in our doctrine and in order to keep some perspective.
I do think that I have been fortunate to make friendships with other scholars, and form reading groups where ideas are exchanged and papers are read. That is a real boon, and it is something I think every scholar or writer can benefit from.
We are still living with the consequences of that today in popular Reformed thinking from the likes of John Piper, R. C. Sproul, and Tim Keller.
[Jonathan Edwards] he has to be engaged with on this issue if you're writing about Calvinism as I am in this book.
The confessions don't speak with one voice. They are more like a cluster of closely-related but distinct voices - a kind of choir, if you like.
The expansion I have in mind isn't the same as distortion. Of course, there are those who say their views represent Reformed thought, but what they end up with is a caricature of what Reformed thinking is really about. I hope I am not one of those people, but readers [of the Saving Calvinism] will have to make up their own minds on that score!
Christ's work is a kind of deterrent to us, and a way of upholding the justice of God's divine government of the world.
Jonathan Edwards developed a Calvinistic strand of the doctrine.
There is the view I call penal non-substitution, or the penal example view. (It is also called the Governmental View in textbooks of theology.) This is often associated with Arminian theology stemming from the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. However, the view was taken up by [Jonathan] Edwards's disciples in New England, who developed a Calvinistic strand of the doctrine.
For instance, the notion of non-penal substitution. This idea, found in the work of the nineteenth century Scottish Reformed theologian John McLeod Campbell and based upon his reading of the letter to the Hebrews in particular, is that Christ offers up his life and death as a penitential act on our behalf, rather than as a punishment in our stead.
