A few years ago, Pastor John was asked if he had any concerns or cautions for this new Calvinism movement. And he did. Here's what he had to say. Oh yeah, and I'll give you one that's just fresh off a prophetic word that was given to me yesterday. You know, take it or leave it for whatever.

I'm cautious about things when people come to me with these kinds of things. But it rung true, and you can get it without having any claim to special divine authority. Making theology God instead of God God. Loving doing theology rather than loving God. Somebody said to me one time, Sam Crabtree, it was.

The danger of the contemporary worship awakening is that we love loving God more than we love God. That was very profound. And you might love thinking about God more than you love God. Or arguing for God more than you love God. Or defending God more than you love God.

Or writing about God more than you love God. Or preaching more than you love God. Or evangelizing more than you love God. Reformed people tend to be thoughtful. That is, they come to the Bible and they want to use their minds to make sense of it. And the best want to make sense of all of it.

Not pick and choose and say, I don't like that verse. That's not like an Arminian verse. We'll put that over here. Well, no. No. You fix your brain. You don't fix the Bible. So being that kind of person that we're prone to systematize and fit things together. Those kinds of people, me, are therefore wired dangerously to begin to idolize the system.

And I don't want to go here too much because I think the whiplash starts to swing the other direction. And so minimize system and minimize thinking and minimize doctrine that we start losing a foothold in the Bible. So that would be a big caution that we be intellectually and emotionally more engaged with the person of Christ, the person of God, the Trinity, than we are with thinking about Him.

And they are inextricably woven. But the reason you're reading the Bible and the reason you're framing thoughts about God from the Bible is to make your way through those thoughts to the real person. The danger of those who do the other thing, namely all that intellectual stuff, no, no, no, doctrine, no, intellect, no, study, no, experience, yes, is that they wind up worshiping a God of their own imagination.

It feels so right. It feels so free. It feels so humble because they're not getting involved in all those debates. But it isn't. It's losing their grip on reality. We are compelled to go there. Hand in glove with that is pride. I mean, that is a species of pride.

When I say there are many species of pride, that's just one of them. You can call it intellectualism if you want. There's emotionalism over there. That's not the danger right now. Intellectualism is a species of pride because we begin to prize our abilities to interpret the Bible over the God of the Bible or the Bible itself.

When I asked Rick Warren, "Bible, tell me your doctrine of the Bible," he said, "Inerrant, authoritative." But I don't mean all my interpretations of it are inerrant and authoritative. And that's, of course, right. We should talk that way. So that would be my flag. That was Pastor John a few years ago addressing his concerns for this movement called New Calvinism.

And speaking of New Calvinism, we did a recent episode on the theme titled, "Where Did All These Calvinists Come From?" That was episode number 237 in the Ask Pastor John archive. See also the very recent episode, if you haven't heard it already, titled, "What's New About New Calvinism?" That was episode number 319, recorded earlier this month.

We will be back tomorrow to ask, "If I want people in other religions to consider reading the Bible, should I then be willing to return the favor and read their holy book?" We'll talk about that tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.