“If God absolutely and pretemporally decrees that particular persons shall be saved and others damned, apart from any cooperation of human freedom, then God cannot in any sense intend that all shall be saved, as 1 Timothy 4:10 declares. The promise of glory is conditional on grace being received by faith active in love.””
“An uncle continued to pay the fees for Calvin to attend school, but it was a long walk from his hut to St. Patrick’s Elementary School. Since he rarely had dinner the night before, his feet felt heavy as he trudged along. “If only I could go to school in the United States,” Calvin often thought on these long walks. And again, he prayed. When Calvin revealed his prayer to his older brother and an aunt, they laughed.””
“If dominant views in science and philosophy are correct in their affirmation of randomness and chance, theologians such as Augustine, Calvin and Sproul are wrong. God does not control all things; randomness is real.””
“On the day of Calvin’s arrival, Mark was on a business trip with our high-school kids, so I went to the airport with the younger ones. I greeted Calvin as he got off the plane; mom and son”
“The preachers quickly learned that he could trade biblical quotations with them almost indefinitely. It was equally pointless to cite the standard Presbyterian authorities. James denounced John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion as 'childish', dismissed John Knox as 'a knave' who ha called 'his mother a whore', and informed the minister who claimed a divine warrant to preach that 'the office of prophets was ended'. The preachers could only suffer his sarcasm in silence.””
Calvin ThomasCalvin Thomas was an influential American scholar and translator, renowned for his contributions to the study of German literature. Born in 1854, he dedicated his career to exploring and disseminating...
“This God guides our lives and provides for our needs. As Calvin said in speaking of our knowledge of God’s providence, “Gratitude of mind for the favorable outcome of things, patience in adversity, and also incredible freedom from worry about the future all necessarily follow upon this knowledge.””
“First, not all the proponents of limited election seem to regard these texts as particularly important. Louis Berkhof, for example, managed to write an entire systematic theology without citing either of the texts in question;129 and though John Calvin did comment upon them briefly in his commentary on 1 John, he evidently did not regard them as important enough even to mention in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. When one thinks about it, this is truly astonishing. Calvin’s Institutes is a monumental work of over 1500 pages; in it he sought to provide an exhaustive summary of Christian doctrine, as he understood it, along with the biblical support for it. In the Westminster Press edition, the index of Bible references alone is thirty-nine pages of small print with three columns per page. And yet, in this entire work, as massive and thorough as it is, Calvin never once found the Johannine declaration that God is love important enough to discuss.””
“No one will ever be a good teacher, if he does not show that he himself is teachable, and always ready to learn.””
“Sins requiring church discipline included forbidden sexual activity, unfair economic practices, and personal conflicts involving quarrels and slander. Calvin wrote voluminously on many of these topics, including sex, marriage, and family.””
“no one can be an effective pastor (whether in a small church or in a congregation of thousands) without self-sacrifice.””