This Week in Calvinism - March 30, 2012

• Does Calvinism make people jerks? "No," writes Kevin DeYoung. "But Calvinism is a useful tool for jerky people to act like jerks."
  
  
• Case in point: Fred Phelps. His son, Nate, discusses his father's religious tyranny that helped push him toward atheism. "The actual theology is called Calvinism. And at the centerpiece of Calvinism is this idea of absolute predestination, that God is the one that picks the saved, as opposed to us making that decision for ourselves. And it was, you know, the environment was such that whatever our father defined as the doctrines of the Bible was what we were required to believe. So there really wasn't any choice in the matter."
  
  
• Carson T. Clark affirms neither Calvinism nor Arminianism, and is committed to "trying to make an effort to commend and criticize both as warranted by the present and historical realities."
  
  
• Scott L., who has moved away from Calvinism, believes "the typical paradigm of the Calvinist-Arminian debate will no longer greatly serve the church or the world of today." He concludes: "It's time to move on to the relevant and important things of today and not stay too well stuck in debates of a previous period." Why does it usually seem to be non-Calvinists who think this particular debate is unnecessary?
  
  
• If you already assume scripture clearly teaches "that turning toward God is a matter of free will," then of course you'll deny that Acts 13:48 has any Calvinist implications regarding God's sovereignty.