Oliver D. Crisp Quotes
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[Jonathan] Edwards definitely shows up in the book [Saving Calvinism]. He appears as one of the interlocutors in the chapter on free will, the other being the Southern Presbyterian theologian John Girardeau.
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[John Calvin's] Humanist training makes him an excellent writer. What is more, he is as relevant today as he was 500 years ago.
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The best Reformed theology isn't just about careful arguments for theologically sophisticated conclusions. It is about how to live the Christian life.
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Here is the interesting twist:[McLeod] Campbell came to his views through reading Jonathan Edwards who suggested at one point in his ruminations on the atonement that Christ could have offered up a perfect act of penitence instead of punishment, and that this would have been an acceptable offering suitable to remit our sinfulness.
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[John] Calvin is revered as a thinker of immense importance in Reformed thought, Jonathan Edwards could say in his preface to his treatise on Freedom of the Will that he had derived none of his views from the work of Calvin, though he was willing to be called a "Calvinist" for the sake of convention.
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Reading [John] Calvin is a breath of fresh air.
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There is no such thing as a stationary tradition. Traditions are always developing, living things.
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We may think that our tradition is exactly the same as it has always been, but that is an illusion.
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I'm sometimes asked about my productivity, which I find a bit embarrassing to be honest. I don't really have a particularly interesting answer to this question.
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How many people in the pews know that [ Jonathan Edwards] is both a founder of evangelicalism and, say, an idealist who denied that the material world exists?
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These days I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist, but I don't really think my views do deviate from the Reformed tradition, though in some respects they may represent views that are not as popular now as they once were, or that may represent a minority report in the tradition.
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For those who have only ever read about [John] Calvin, reading the man himself is an invigorating experience.
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One of the things we in the Reformed tradition are very good at is writing doctrinal theology!
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[John] Calvin's Institutes is often called a summary of Christian piety. You can't say that about many modern works of theology. You can say it of Calvin.
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No confession is inerrant; Reformed Christians are supposed to be those who seek to be constantly reformed according to the Word of God - and that includes our confessions as well.
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[I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist] but that only goes to underline the point I'm trying to make about the need to broaden our account of the tradition!
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I think everyone who has an interest in Reformed theology, or just in Christian theology more generally, should read John Calvin Institutes.
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In the chapter on the nature of the atonement [in the book saving Calvinism] I argue that it is a mistake to think that penal substitution is the only option on the doctrine of atonement.
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I don't really have a lot of interns, although I do now use Research Assistants to help me compile indexes when that is necessary.
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Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not rubbishing penal substitution. But there are other options that have been advocated by Reformed thinkers of the past.
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[John] Calvin is often identified with his account of predestination. Yet that appears in the third book of his Institutes, not the first.
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For instance, the notion of non-penal substitution. This idea, found in the work of the nineteenth century Scottish Reformed theologian John McLeod Campbell and based upon his reading of the letter to the Hebrews in particular, is that Christ offers up his life and death as a penitential act on our behalf, rather than as a punishment in our stead.
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The expansion I have in mind isn't the same as distortion. Of course, there are those who say their views represent Reformed thought, but what they end up with is a caricature of what Reformed thinking is really about. I hope I am not one of those people, but readers [of the Saving Calvinism] will have to make up their own minds on that score!
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I recommend Doug Sweeney's recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.