Thursday, April 06, 2006

Why I Am Not An Arminian final summary

I finished Why I Am Not An Arminian yesterday. Their best chapters were definitely the historical theology ones. When they talked about divine sovereignty, they seemed to be arguing mainly against open theology and didn't really address traditional Wesleyan-Arminian beliefs.

They are infralapsarian, as the chapter on predestination made clear. This makes their version of Calvinism less rigid and closer to a Wesleyan-Arminian understanding. In several places they say that they can't explain the doctrine, but leave it as a mystery. While I am all in favor of leaving things as mysteries, I was left wondering why it didn't make more sense to agree with the traditional Wesleyan understanding and leave things as a mystery which are unexplainable. What I mean is, there are many verses which seem to imply that we must persevere, that it is possible to make genuine choices (not just in a compatibilist way). If you are going to leave things as a mystery, why discount these verses with tortured exegesis? Why not accept them and leave the exact outworkings as a mystery? Why redefine "all" in a limited way to defend a limited atonement? To their credit, they do acknowledge that many Calvinists have done a less than good job in exegeting these passages, but I was left wondering how their exegesis was any better.

On the whole, the book was OK, but I was disappointed. I expected a more robust defense of Calvinism. Perhaps I was looking for something they weren't trying to deliver, after all it is an introductory book. Most people who read it will not have read Calvin or any other Reformed theologian, with the possible exception of a "pop-theologian."

Now the question is, what to read next...

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