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Which John Calvin?
When I explain Calvinism to college students they make it clear they want nothing to do with it. Of course, I teach at a Methodist school but that doesn’t really account for their en masse aversion. (Turns out most Methodist undergraduates don’t know enough about their own ecclesial history to argue for or against, say, predestination. Plus, the class has plenty of Catholics, Lutherans, even Presbyterians who also find John Calvin deeply disagreeable).
This persists even when I tell them that predestination is hardly the centerpiece of Calvin’s theological enterprise; that divine freedom and sovereignty (not castigating judgment) frame Calvin’s outlook and agenda; that TULIP is a later, mostly unhelpful, invention; that it might even be possible to interpret Calvin, as Marilynne Robinson has persuasively done, as an aesthete.
Doesn’t matter.... READ MORE.
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