A mystical faith?
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A mystical faith?

No one has ever accused me of being a mystic. For one thing, I don’t dress the part. No flowing robes or beard down to the belly. Corduroy trousers and tweed jackets are my style. But even apart from sartorial evidence, my writings show few signs of flirting with mysticism. I love the carefully constructed…

The mysterious case of Marguerite Périer
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The mysterious case of Marguerite Périer

The miraculous healing of a 12-year-old girl brought the French army to a standstill in 1656. The girl was Marguerite Périer. She was Blaise Pascal’s niece and a boarding student at an abbey just outside of Paris called Port-Royal-des-Champs. Marguerite was suffering from an incurable physical ailment: an eye abscess. Several doctors had examined the…

Holding sadness in one hand, and joy in the other
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Holding sadness in one hand, and joy in the other

The show The Good Place is one of the most remarkable things to ever appear on television. It is a show about the afterlife – and behind the all-star cast was an all-star team of PhDs who loaded the scripts with quotes and ideas from moral philosophy. In one scene, an angel named Michael muses…

Grasping the rope of grace
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Grasping the rope of grace

This column will conclude my brief foray into an examination of the Five Points of Calvinism as articulated in the Canons of Dordt, one of the Three Forms of Unity of Reformed churches, including the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA). The fourth point of the Calvinist TULIP is Irresistible Grace. The irresistibleness of…

Remembering ron Sider
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Remembering ron Sider

As an undergraduate student in the mid 1970s I came into contact with the writings of several Christian leaders who were advocates of social justice, a concept that was new to me at the time. Accordingly, I began reading Sojourners, The Other Side, and, of course, Vanguard, which was published out of 229 College Street,…

Snip the TULIP
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Snip the TULIP

Rather than “Tiptoeing through the TULIP(s),” I prefer to snip the TULIP. The acronym TULIP is an oversimplification and distortion of the nuanced teaching of the Canons of Dort. Despite the impression of a venerable Dutch heritage, the acronym TULIP makes no sense in the Dutch language, which spells the famous flower as tulp. TULIP…

EVIL, Backwards
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EVIL, Backwards

There are three kinds of people in the church today: deists, dualists and devoted. In 2005, sociologists Smith and Lundquist coined the phrase “Moral Therapeutic Deism” to describe a belief of American teenagers: religion is about being “good” (culturally defined) so that one can be happy; God is a minimally involved Creator. It’s an individualistic…

The choices of God
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The choices of God

The second and third of the Five Points of Calvinism (known by the acronym of TULIP) have to do with the time God decided or knew (past tense) about what would happen (future tense). As I said in my previous column, these doctrines violate the fact that God does not exist in time, which in…

Coren’s conversion
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Coren’s conversion

“My core beliefs haven’t changed,” Michael Coren says. But “I can’t imagine who I was spiritually eight years ago.” The landscape of personal faith can change over time. Scandal, abuse, disillusionment and burnout are just a few of the deconstruction triggers prompting Christians to re-examine what we believe and why. It’s a process that usually…

A doctrine of time
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A doctrine of time

As mentioned in my previous column, the Canons of Dort (1619) were formulated as an orthodox Calvinist response to purported errors in theology taught by Jacob Arminius (1560 – 1609). Although the theological differences between Arminians and Calvinists were (and are) complicated, they fundamentally hinge on different claims about the sovereignty of God. Calvinists claim…

Tiptoe Through the TULIP(s)
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Tiptoe Through the TULIP(s)

The Three Forms of Unity is a collective name for the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and the Canons of Dort (1619) which reflect the teachings of Calvinism and which are accepted as official doctrinal statements by many Calvinist churches, including the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). Anyone seeking an official position (minister, elder, deacon) in the CRC must…

Many are called, but few are chosen?
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Many are called, but few are chosen?

“[God] desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Tim. 2:4). Having been brought up in a Calvinist home and listened all my life to sermons in Reformed churches, I have grown to believe that only a chosen few will be saved from eternal damnation by the grace…