Excellent column gamecock. This diary should be front-paged, and it is important to remember the principles of John Calvin.

I’m reading all about American Exceptionalism and I’m having a big problem w/ it that seems to put me at odds w/ movement Conservatives. That is, I basically find myself in philosophical aposition to people I’m agreeing w/ about 80% of the time. See if you can help me sort this out…

Under Predestination, you are saved as a member of the elect. Under American Exceptionalism, we are exceptional just ‘coz. This stuff just doesn’t pass my BS monitor. I’ve always associated salvation and exceptionalism with weight lifting.

Mainly, like the pimple-faced kid trying to bench 185 more than just once or twice, neither happens until you’ve invested the sweat equity. I’ll never be either a perfect Christian or a perfect American. I’ll never squat 425 again at my age. I can try hard to all of the above once again before I die.

I guess what I’m totally not getting, is how any of the things that I’ve listed above can be given as opposed to earned.

Sort of along the lines of “It’s a Republic Madame - if you can keep it.”

Reco’d and I’ll get it dugg here shortly. Not enough Christians are aware of the influence of men like Calvin on the Church, me included. You’ve given me some reading to do.

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“No. You can’t” -Moe Lane

I think a lot of your points are dead on, but I also think that most of your points are also beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. I know this isn’t the place for religious argument, but the post takes quite a few thinly veiled swipes at the Catholic Church that are common misperceptions about the Church.

First, the Catholic Church wrote the bible as we know it (though various denominations will tweak it here and there) there were no other Christians other than the Catholic Church for the first 1200 years or so. The modern bible is most commonly traced to St. Jerome’s translation into the Latin Vulgate sometime in the 400’s. The Catholic Church has never taught against the bible, though many have come along and reinterpreted the bible to mean slightly different things. But consider if you passed this diary onto your son and he passed it on to his and so on for 700 years, each time carefully explaining the meaning you intended – then suddenly someone decides your diary doesn’t mean what your heirs say it means, and that people shouldn’t listen to your heirs anyway.

Second, the Catholic Church (though in need of reform in some areas) did not stifle the reading of the bible or education. The fact that priests were among the most educated of the time merely indicates that the church did in fact provide more education than any other institution. The lack of a printing press (and economical paper) and the economy of the day is what kept us in the dark ages. The ability to produce a bible in less than a month was a leap in technology that enabled the masses to read the bible – which the Catholic Church encouraged. It’s like coming down 1000 years from now when every car can fly and saying that in the 1900’s “Pilots” suppressed the majority of people’s ability to fly so that they could be lords of the air. When in fact the problem was that airplanes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pre-protestant revolution Christians (i.e. Catholics) were the most martyred peoples in all of history. Yet the Popes never condoned any physical abuse of non-believers. The Catholic Church has always favored religious freedom, but it has also demanded those who call themselves believers actually follow Church teaching (more in the past than now obviously). After the reformation, the Protestants were just as great of persecutors of Catholics as vice versa. Consider for example Henry VIII who decided to marry Ann Bolin against the Church’s refusal to give him an annulment. So he embraced the protestant reformation, made himself head of the Church of England, and killed any Catholics who refused to renounce their faith. This famously included his former best friend Sir Thomas More. Remember the Puritans came to America for religious freedom – not from the Catholic Church, but from the Protestant Church of England. Mostly the persecutions that occurred by both Catholics and Protestants occurred not because the clergy in either group supported them, but because the leaders of a particular country supported them and they were violent times.

Also I would add, that the crusades along with the printing press are often credited for bringing us out of the dark ages because the crusades allowed people exposure to the much more of the world and ignited the combining of ideas from different towns, countries and cultures. I would also say that the crusades are another source of false accusation against the Catholic Church, who sought not to conquer in the first instance, but to re-take those lands captured by Muslims from the Christians, and not to “own” more land, but because the Muslims refused religious freedom to those in their lands, where the Catholics had allowed religious freedom to others when they ruled those same lands.

I am not saying people in the Catholic Church are free from all sorts of wrong-doing, because they have been, they are, and they will be in the future – but Church teaching as opposed to individual action has rarely gone astray, and Church teaching in the only area that it claims perfection “faith and morals” has not gone astray at all to my belief. I also don’t undermine the contributions of Calvin. I just can’t agree with blaming the Catholics for what they didn’t do, when it was hundreds of thousands of Catholics who died for their faith so that Calvin could even have the opportunity to speak freely of Christ.

including the indomitable GC–to whom thanks for putting this up!–as I prepare to celebrate this Feast Day of St. Jean de Wien.

And those would be —

1) Granted the beneficial influences–listed by GC above–of Mssr. Cauvin’s thought upon secular culture and government in the past 400+ years, how do you view the persistent attempts by a majority of American Christians, from the Founders’ generation through today’s most beloved evangelical bellwethers, to disembowel and discredit the heart of his theology?

2) Do you feel that those attempts, by Christians, could have adverse effects in secular culture and government–to say nothing of the Church?

3) How have your answers to (1) and (2) affected your own life?

In respect of GC and RS, I am proposing these rhetorically. There are venues set up to handle this sort of dialog, and this is not one. But, it doesn’t hurt to ask a question now and then–at least every 500 years or so!

Happy birthday, John! Some of us look forward to seeing you soon!

This recent White Horse Inn interview The 500th Anniversary of John Calvin’s Birth, of Calvin scholar Dr. Robert Godfrey (Westminster Seminary CA) by Dr. Michael Horton (also WSC) would be a good place to start.

(And the site is great place to visit for clear, lively presentation of Reformation-based truth).

I was raised in Primitive Baptist confinement. I ate stringy home-grown chicken as the Preacher and my parents discussed salvation by works or by faith on lots of Sundays in my youth. I have to admit that both my parents disgusted me at times as they simply accepted the unacceptable and resolved it for themselves by saying, “God’s will be done.”

In my later life I’ve spent a lot of time researching the American Civil War. One quickly comes to conclude that the only reason that men could behave so irrationaly as to march shoulder to shoulder into the face of massed cannons is the belief that not their personal conduct but God’s will would determine whether they lived or died.

Having had a lot of Preachers for Sunday dinner, I came to conclude that either my name was written in the Lamb’s Book of Life or it was not, so it didn’t matter what I did. That freed me to have one Hell of a good time with my life.

one man could not accomplish anything apart from God working in his life, and therefore it is God who deserves the honor, not this man. I would think Calvin would agree that the glory and honor for what took place belongs to God, and God alone.

It takes more than a single man to change the direction of corrupt people or institutions. It takes the Holy Spirit of God humbling the hearts of the multitudes for historical events to take place.

Thanks for the great diary, as always.

I facebooked your diary to a retired minister of the (dutch) Christian Reformed Church who told me today he votes democratic. The CRC is based on the teachings of Calvin (who rocks, IMHO).