The Tulip Driven Life

By: Thomas F. Booher I had a wonderful discussion with a Christian who I would best describe (based just on one extended conversation) as an Anglo-Catholic in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), and a big fan of C.S. Lewis. He is a philosophy professor, and with him I probably had the most stimulating conversation about God and Christianity that I've ever had with a non-Calvinist.  In fact, he said the one thing he was pretty sure that he wasn't, was a Calvinist. A lot of other things were still on the table for him, but Calvinism probably wasn't (but we'll see). Yet in a real sense, this didn't bother me too much. It is akin to our admiration as Reformed believers for C.S. Lewis (who was also very much like an Anglo-Catholic) or G.K. Chesterton, both of whom explicitly rejected Calvinism as making God into something evil, not unlike my philosophy friend.  I'd like in a separate post to talk about justification by faith alo...

I've believed in the TULIP, the doctrines of grace, the five points, the biblical way in which God saves man, for a little over three years now. And I've been reforming everything ever since. Understanding rightly how God saves you for the first time, changes everything. It changes your view of God, of Christ, of man. That's an all-encompassing, paradigm shifting, truth, and all one's theology and all one's life must be conformed to it. Unfortunately, we seem to have something of a melting pot of Calvinism- we take a little charismatic teaching and attach it to a Calvinistic soteriology, or a seeker-oriented church preaches Calvinistic soteriology (which, on all accounts, makes zero sense whatsoever). But I believe that even those who do not add these more extreme admixtures can still fall into the trap of thinking that the five points are enough, that Calvinism is enough, that Calvinism speaks to salvation and nothing else. On the contrary, because Calvinism ...