This Week in Calvinism - May 4, 2012

• Calvinist pastor Chris Roberts has introduced a resolution for consideration at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting seeking unity in spite of theological differences.
  
  
• Greg Forster, author of The Joy of Calvinism, has written a series of articles on evangelicals in politics for Public Discourse. (part 1, part 2, part 3)
  
  
• Relevant features a "debate" on Calvinism in the form of interviews with Michael Horton and Roger Olson.
  
  
• I appreciate an article critical of Joel Osteen as much as the next guy, and this article in Salon makes some pretty good points. But was it really necessary to attack Calvinism in the process? The author writes: "Osteen's serene depictions of God's eternally uptending designs for the fates of individual believers are a sort of inverted Calvinism. Where the Puritan forebears of today's Protestant scene beheld a terrible, impersonal Creator whose rigid system of eternal reward and punishment dispatched many an infant and solemn believer to the pit of damnation, Osteen's God is an intensely personal presence, guiding believers out of pitfalls into inevitable glory and joy — not so much a raging Patriarch as a genial cruise director." That kind of ignorance lends little to journalistic credibility.
  
  
• The gospel shines brighter through the lens of the doctrines of grace.