path: root/faith/calvinism-purity-of-atonement.rst

'Calvinism & Purity of Atonement'
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:date: 2012-08-01T13:13:13
:category: faith
:tags: Bible, Calvinism

While searching for something else I randomly hit on these_ two_
video presentations of one very fighting Calvinist. It felt to me like
from the different world: it sounded most of all like the Chesterton’s
lunatic who was perfectly rational. This guy is sitting in front of tons
and tons of what I believe are deep Biblical thoughts, which people
spent their whole lives thinking about and writing, and yet he doesn’t
understand (and I am afraid doesn’t want to understand) a word of what
is going on in the John 3:16 Conference.

In the conference, another man comes and describes in a bit of emotional
confusion his personal experience about how he met Jesus personally. He
goes quite overboard, rejected all his past theology, and probably truly
in his testimony suggests that God doesn’t accept Calvinists or
something of that sort. Such revelation of sudden meaning of known words
certainly exists. I can certainly testify to my similar experience when
I found that things I happened to actually even teach were suddenly for
me revealed as very personal and existential experience. I think I was
very strongly warned by God, that I shouldn’t reject everything I
believe before (although of course, that was tempting) and that I should
rather work on better understanding of my experience and Scripture. Now,
usually when one describes how she found purely rational understanding
of Bible to be insufficient for her relationship with God, she don’t use
many Biblical verses to support her thesis. Kind of makes sense to me.
However, not to the Calvinist: existence of a personal revelation and a
life-changing experience seems to be suspicious to the Chesterton’s
madman.

And yet, I cannot exclude a possibility that the only mistake this man
did was to mistake highly sophisticated academic discussion with the
popular conference. Is this just misdirected legitimate theological
discussion which is presented as a public show instead in the Journal of
Theology? Or is whole Reformed theology just a Christian version of
pilpul, deep, complicated and mostly useless discussion about the Bible?
Not sure.

.. _these:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUtAy2Hc-4
.. _two:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGJsGw36Hk