I don't care what you call it

This will not turn into a rant or a six-page exposition of human frailty. I just have something burdening me after doing my daily skim of the blogosphere.

Listen: do you hate Calvinism? I'm OK with that, really -- you're allowed to be intellectually and even emotionally opposed to the idea that soteriology places man in a subordinate and mercy-needing position before God. That doesn't make you right, but you are within your rights to think that way.

Here's what I don't care for, really: I don't care for you being unable to be honest about Calvinism. That comes in two major brand names, so if you fall into one of them you can go ahead and start being offended:

[1] Hunt's Tomato Paste: "I hate Calvinism, but I can't accurately describe the Doctrines which constitute such a thing." Listen: read a book or something -- and I mean read the whole book, don;t skim it in hopes that you have picked out the useful bits by mistake. The Five Points of Calvinism, 2nd Ed., By D.N. Steele, C.C. Thomas & S.L. Quinn, would be a great and brief place for you to start.

[2] Caner's Spaghetti Noodles: "I hate Calvinism, and I will handle Scripture in any way that I need to in order to tell people how mad it makes me." See -- the thing is that there are some passages of Scripture that you have to admit make God look pretty sovereign and unthwartable. For example, Gen 50 makes it clear that God intends to work a saving end out of the evil intentions and actions of Joseph's brothers -- and whether there's a broader application to all things there or not, that's a really amazing piece of evidence that God's sovereignty is also over the ends and means of salvation. And John 6 -- dude, that may be the most wholly-abused passage of the whole Bible, with the remarkable fact that there are not two non-Calvinist perspectives on that passage which agree with each other. If you get serious about your hermeneutic, and you find a passage that teaches something about God you don't like, the answer is not to change your hermeneutic: it is to change your understanding about God.

Thanks. Back to work with you ...