Quotes About Calvinism

I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine-driven. And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue about things.

from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England's most published author.

I admire Calvin more than I do any of the Calvinists, Edwards included.

In this sense, Calvin did assert a belief in "free will," which, for Calvin, amounted not to a human's natural ability to choose what is good but to his voluntary choice to do what is evil. Because of the fallenness of human nature, the only freedom of the human will, apart from grace, is the freedom from righteousness.

In Christ we are no longer dominated by the flesh, but by the Spirit; but we are not yet delivered from the flesh. So long as this eschatological tension exists for the believer, so long will there be—in Calvin's view—a gap between the definition of faith and the actual experience of the believer:

Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That's why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.

Edwards's piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-centered worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy. Mark Noll

No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.

Till 1782, I believed in the doctrine of Calvin: that is, that the majority of mankind were objects of divine condemnation and that their punishment would be everlasting. The 'Systeme de la Nature,' read about the beginning of that year, changed my opinion and made me a Deist.

We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus "means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God's rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.

No wonder I'm anxious: I'm like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.

As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.

Durante siglos, al menos desde la reforma protestante, las elites económicas occidentales se han regocijado en la idea de que ser pobre es una situación voluntaria. Los calvinistas la consideraban una consecuencia de la dejadez y las malas costumbres; y los pensadores positivos la atribuyen a una incapacidad obstinada para abrazar la abundancia.

El calvinismo y el pensamiento positivo ya se habían visto las caras en el siglo XIX, aunque al segundo se le llamaba entonces Nuevo Pensamiento; cuando volvieron a encontrarse, cerca ya del cambio de milenio, la confrontación ya no fue pública sino que tomó la forma de batalla silenciosa por el dominio del mercado: la audiencia de televisión, las ventas de libros y la asistencia a las iglesias.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism—beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.

Golf was just what the Scottish character had been searching for for centuries. Namely, a method of self-torture disguised as a game, which could entrap irreligious youths into principles of what was to become first known as Calvinism and then … golf. The main tenets of this faith are that life is grim and uncomfortable and that human vanity cannot prevail.

Calvinism did not spring from Calvin. We believe that it sprang from the great Founder of all truth.

I think there's a very strong Calvinistic bias against a free lunch. The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences.

D. G. Hart, in his book Recovering Mother Kirk, rightly urges Presbyterians 'to abandon the notion of the church as personal trainer' and to recover 'Calvin's idea of the church as mother.' 9

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

John Calvin had labored for more than twenty years to find that 'order,' an explanation of Christian doctrine that not only instructed readers in the faith but also moved their hearts and minds to accept the truth of the Gospel. Through those years of writing, revision, and additions, Calvin created one of the great books of his age." Bruce Gordon ?#?CalvinsInstitutes?

There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same.

The doctrines known as Calvinism are not something that emerged late in church history, but rather are that which takes its origins in the teachings of Jesus.1 —James Montgomery Boice