J. Jump said:
Dustin I'm curious have you always gone to a Presbyterian church and believed in Calvinism or is it something new to you? Thanks in advance for your time.
No, I was raised in a SBC and a few Pentecostal ones. In fact, when I was 5 or 6 I thought every church in the world was a baptist church. I had never heard of John Calvin or Arminius or Pelagius or Augustine until about a little over a year ago. I was familiar with the Reformation though and Martin Luther.
Louisiana is largely Roman Catholic, we don't have counties, we have parishes. They used to show people praying the rosary on Saturday morning before all the cartoons came on. So I had zero Presbyterian or Reformed influence at all until I started going to a Presbyterian church.
That and there are only 3 or 4 Presbyterian churches in the city. On the road I live on, there is one huge baptist church with thousands of memebers, a United Methodist church, a small SDA congregation, and a Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). I go "out of the way" to go to Bethel, and now that I think about it there is right next door to us the Lake Charles Bible Church. All the big churches here are Baptist or Pentecostal. Bethel has no more than 50 or so people.
I did a lot of praying and reading on Calvinism. Because of people like Fred Phelps who butcher it and the Wesleyans whose sole purpose is hating it. I've gone over all kinds of doctrines of all kinds of denominations, read Wesley, Calvin, Augustine, Arminius, MacArthur, Cairns, Spurgeon, Paisley, Sproul, Corner, Whitefield, and the list goes on and on. What I have found is, no system of theology is as close to the Bible as so called 5 point Calvinism. As far as salvific doctrines, correctly weighing God's soveriegnty and man's resonsibility, I don't find anything closer. Believe me I have checked it out. In largely secular Europe, the most evangelistic churches are the Free Presbyterians, and Independent Fundamental Baptists (and the majority of IFB's there are Calvinists too).
So, yes, it IS pretty new to me, but I'm convinced of it. Systematic theology (Calvinism, Arminianism, the creeds and confessions) isn't what saves you, I just want to get that out of the way. It's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. But what it does do is show you why you believe that it's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone throughout the whole Bible. I say, read your Bible, and when you read other teachers or theologians, test them by the Scriptures.Let us all be like the Bereans.
I'm still learning a whole lot, still searching, still reading, still refining. I'd also suggest to read the classical creeds and confessions and because you'd be suprised how many people purposfully leave things out or twist things to make thier view seem right. It's not a sin, as some think, to look back at the Church in the past and accept those things too. It's very important to know what was going on back then that led them to the conclusions they came to. It's not a sin to be knowledgeable about our common faith. The Bible is our sole authority, but we can look back on the Reformers and the Puritans, and still get great helps from them also.
May the Lord bless all your studies.
Soli Deo Gloria,
Dustin
