John Calvin’s theology arrests attention at the outset on two accounts: it has been extraordinarily influential, and it has been extraordinarily maligned.
John Calvin’s theology arrests attention at the outset on two accounts: it has been extraordinarily influential, and it has been extraordinarily maligned.
[blockquote] John Calvin’s theology … has been extraordinarily maligned [/blockquote]
At the center of modern man’s self-image is his autonomy. He jealously guards his autonomous will as a dog protects its last bone. This then is Calvin’s mortal sin in the eyes of modern man – to declare that man’s will is not autonomous. Alas! but God is still sovereign, and cares nothing for the opinions of man or his presumed freedom. If men revile Calvin’s teaching, there is Another who will not.
carl
The first “Calvinistic” book I ever read had a preface to it by Dr. Packer. It was John Owen’s “Death of Death in the Death of Christ”. For ten years or so I believed that Owen’s view (and Packer’s) on limited atonement was Calvin’s. I now doubt that.
Eugene, I read the same introduction essay by Packer to Owen’s book. I came to the same doubts as you concerning Calvin’s views on limited atonement, and indeed, the whole relationship of Calvin to Calvinism. Still, I have to tip my hat to Packer as a remarkable thinker and theologian. He is still one of those “guiding lights” in my early formation that I can still look back on with fondness.
[Maybe off topic] In the book behind the movie The Golden Compass the atheist/anti-church author Philip Pullman imagines Pope John Calvin with the papacy in Geneva. The picture is a dark one, combining the worst of the papacy with Calvin’s rather authoritarian methods leading the church in Geneva. Pullman has a world in which Calvin’s good gifts were headed off by the hated Church and so, the Reformation never happened.
So Calvin keeps showing up, often in bad light.
The movie will, of course, avoid all that. But it does retain the Magesterium as the great evil of the world, trying to prevent innocent children from gaining maturity and wisdom through life/sexual experience.
If you see the movie, beware of getting the books for children (their intended audience). They are woven with hatred for “the Church” and in the third volume, the pathetic, weak God of the Church is killed off. The trilogy turns Genesis 1-3 on its head and makes Satan the hero for trying to get the humans to gain wisdom through experience (eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil).
Calvin could have written a blistering review of the books and movie.
[blockquote]It is doubtful whether any other theologian has ever played so significant a part in world history.[/blockquote]
I suspect that not a few Augustinian scholars would have a few words to say in that regard.
[blockquote] [blockquote] It is doubtful whether any other theologian has ever played so significant a part in world history.[/blockquote]
I suspect that not a few Augustinian scholars would have a few words to say in that regard. [/blockquote]
I’d image a not a few would dispute with Aquinas as well, especially with touching other disciplines of science and philosophy or by drawing responses from Calvin and Luther, as ideas do not form in vacuums but tend to build on each other, even if in negative reaction.