Cautions for New Calvinists

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:05.000 | A few years ago, Pastor John was asked if he had any concerns or cautions for this new Calvinism movement.

00:00:12.000 | And he did. Here's what he had to say.

00:00:14.000 | Oh yeah, and I'll give you one that's just fresh off a prophetic word that was given to me yesterday.

00:00:21.000 | You know, take it or leave it for whatever. I'm cautious about things when people come to me with these kinds of things.

00:00:29.000 | But it rung true, and you can get it without having any claim to special divine authority.

00:00:37.000 | Making theology God instead of God God.

00:00:43.000 | Loving doing theology rather than loving God.

00:00:47.000 | Somebody said to me one time, Sam Crabtree, it was.

00:00:51.000 | The danger of the contemporary worship awakening is that we love loving God more than we love God.

00:00:58.000 | That was very profound.

00:01:01.000 | And you might love thinking about God more than you love God.

00:01:05.000 | Or arguing for God more than you love God.

00:01:08.000 | Or defending God more than you love God.

00:01:11.000 | Or writing about God more than you love God.

00:01:14.000 | Or preaching more than you love God.

00:01:17.000 | Or evangelizing more than you love God.

00:01:20.000 | Reformed people tend to be thoughtful.

00:01:26.000 | That is, they come to the Bible and they want to use their minds to make sense of it.

00:01:34.000 | And the best want to make sense of all of it.

00:01:37.000 | Not pick and choose and say, I don't like that verse.

00:01:39.000 | That's not like an Arminian verse. We'll put that over here.

00:01:41.000 | Well, no. No. You fix your brain. You don't fix the Bible.

00:01:45.000 | So being that kind of person that we're prone to systematize and fit things together.

00:01:53.000 | Those kinds of people, me, are therefore wired dangerously to begin to idolize the system.

00:02:00.000 | And I don't want to go here too much because I think the whiplash starts to swing the other direction.

00:02:06.000 | And so minimize system and minimize thinking and minimize doctrine that we start losing a foothold in the Bible.

00:02:14.000 | So that would be a big caution that we be intellectually and emotionally more engaged with the person of Christ,

00:02:25.000 | the person of God, the Trinity, than we are with thinking about Him.

00:02:29.000 | And they are inextricably woven.

00:02:32.000 | But the reason you're reading the Bible and the reason you're framing thoughts about God from the Bible

00:02:37.000 | is to make your way through those thoughts to the real person.

00:02:42.000 | The danger of those who do the other thing, namely all that intellectual stuff,

00:02:47.000 | no, no, no, doctrine, no, intellect, no, study, no, experience, yes,

00:02:53.000 | is that they wind up worshiping a God of their own imagination.

00:02:57.000 | It feels so right. It feels so free. It feels so humble because they're not getting involved in all those debates.

00:03:03.000 | But it isn't. It's losing their grip on reality.

00:03:07.000 | We are compelled to go there.

00:03:10.000 | Hand in glove with that is pride.

00:03:12.000 | I mean, that is a species of pride.

00:03:15.000 | When I say there are many species of pride, that's just one of them.

00:03:19.000 | You can call it intellectualism if you want.

00:03:22.000 | There's emotionalism over there. That's not the danger right now.

00:03:25.000 | 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.

00:03:37.000 | When I asked Rick Warren, "Bible, tell me your doctrine of the Bible," he said, "Inerrant, authoritative."

00:03:43.000 | But I don't mean all my interpretations of it are inerrant and authoritative.

00:03:48.000 | And that's, of course, right. We should talk that way.

00:03:52.000 | So that would be my flag.

00:03:55.000 | That was Pastor John a few years ago addressing his concerns for this movement called New Calvinism.

00:04:00.000 | And speaking of New Calvinism, we did a recent episode on the theme titled,

00:04:04.000 | "Where Did All These Calvinists Come From?"

00:04:07.000 | That was episode number 237 in the Ask Pastor John archive.

00:04:11.000 | See also the very recent episode, if you haven't heard it already, titled,

00:04:14.000 | "What's New About New Calvinism?"

00:04:17.000 | That was episode number 319, recorded earlier this month.

00:04:21.000 | We will be back tomorrow to ask, "If I want people in other religions to consider reading the Bible,

00:04:26.000 | should I then be willing to return the favor and read their holy book?"

00:04:30.000 | We'll talk about that tomorrow.

00:04:32.000 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:04:34.000 | [ Silence ]

00:04:39.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Cautions for New Calvinists

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