Tim Warner on the origins of Calvinism asserts that it is “Christian philosophical speculations, [that] eventually led to what is today called, ‘Calvinism.'”
I do not know too many philosophers that have written a mountain of commentaries, which I suspect Warner has not read a single volume.
Nor do I know too many Christian philosophers who have been humble to the point of uttering the following words:
And yet I will exert special effort to the end that they who lend ready and open ears to God’s Word may have a firm standing ground. Here, indeed, if anywhere in the secret mysteries of Scripture, we ought to play the philosopher soberly and with great moderation; let us use great caution that neither our thoughts nor our speech go beyond the limits to which the Word of God itself extends. For how can the human mind meaure off the measureless essence of God according to its own little meaure, a mind as yet unable to establish for certain the nature of the sun’s body, though men’s eyes daily gaze upon it? Indeed, how can the mind by its own leading come to search out God’s essence when it cannot even get to its own? Let us then willingly leave to God the knowledge of himself. For, as Hilary (of Poitiers) says, he is the one fit witness to himself, and is not known except through himself. But we shall be “leaving it to him” if we conceive him to be as he reveals himself to us, without inquiring about him elsewhere than from his Word. — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I:XIII:21.
One wonders if Tim Warner has examined the origins of his own Arminian Tradition, which is actually the philosophical system called libertarianism that underlies humanism, Roman Catholicism, and Greek pagan philosophy. But make no mistake, this system is not so much a “historical tradition” as it is the ahistorical phenomenon found in the heart of every creature, which desires to be autonomous from his Creator. And only by the grace of God does the creature recognize that there is only one free being in the universe: God.
