"John Calvin, he was much more engrossed in speculations concerning God than in the observation of mankind. God is, so to say, the fixed center and starting-point of all his thoughts. He meditates and imagines, and if I dared, I would say that he presents God to us, and describes Him as if he knew Him thoroughly, and had exclusive possession of Him. He then summons man into the presence of God, and denies or calmly rejects everything in him which does not accord with or cannot be adjusted to the God whom he has conceived and depicted. He denies free-will of man and affirms his predestination, because he imagines that man's free-will is opposed to the idea which he has formed of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and that his predestination is necessary to it. Calvin had a very imperfect knowledge and understanding of man because he professed to know and understand too much about God".
-- M. Guizot
- It is never good to impose your speculation about God over Scripture. We cannot rely unskeptically on our rationalizing mind on how we understand God to be. It should be reverse, we allow Scripture to tell us who and how is God in his being not the otherway around.
- There is arrogance in Calvin in thinking he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt who is God in his being.
2 comments:
Those are good observations. One of the American Lutherans observed that Calvinism decays into Unitarianism. When denominations are part-Calvin and part-Lutheran, they go downhill in doctrine more slowly, but it is inevitable.
WELS and the LCMS are far more involved in Calvinism and Romanism than Lutheran doctrine itself, no matter how loud they squeal when that is pointed out. People who love their Walther tattoos are quick to attack those who believe and teach Justification by Faith. The find the Chief Article of Christianity (not just of Lutherans) to be odious.
Indeed Pr Greg.
Thank you for your comment on this.
Waltherians or NeoLutherans are actually Calvinizing Lutherans.
The two are cut from the same cloth.
Thus, they wind up in the same destination, eventually when taken to their final conclusion both deteriorate to liberalism as well.
LPC
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