Plantinga Chapter Four

After reading the chapter titled Redemption, I can agree with Plantinga's views on Christ, as can most of us who have grown up in Christian homes - God sent Christ, His only Son, to Earth; Christ was a fisher of men, He never sinned, He was "persecuted, dead, and burried" as the Nicene Creed states, and He rose again on the third day. But as for the rest of the chapter, I can't say I entirely agree. I don't hold the same view towards predestination, total depravity, common grace, or preservation of the saints that Calvinists do, and so it was hard for me to read the rest of the chapter because everything that Plantinga states is saturated with Calvinist beliefs. (For example, I was raised to believe that anyone can lose his or her salvation. This goes along with a verse we talked about in class - about being lukewarm, and thus spat out of God's mouth. I also do not read or confess the Canons of Dort, the Belhaur Confessions, or the Heidleberg Catechism.)

Today we talked in class about whether or not going to a Christian college like Calvin could bring us closer or farther away from Christ. For me - and this started at the other university I attended - I have experienced both. I have found that learning so much more about God and His creation and Revelation than I ever could have in church has made it hard for me to go to church for several reasons. One being that the more I hear pastors speak, the more my heart hardens against church sermons because they are too simplisitc, too easy, too geared towards entertainment than truth oftentimes. The music is the same - either so stubbornly rooted in tradition that the church is losing members (like a certain CRC church I attend one Sunday a month) or too concerned about entertainment and not enough about God, (like the church I used to attend before college). And at the same time all of this is happening, God is preparing me to go into my vocation - International Development - and I can easily recognize the ways in which this is happening. Ultimately, I feel that my faith in Humanity has decreased, and my faith in God increased. I've really enjoyed all of the philosophical discussion the Lewis exerpts and sermons have inspired in this class, and as for Plantinga, all I can say to him is that: 1. the focus should be on loving others, and not judging them, and 2. writing a book on Calvinism for a diverse audience should be less from a white upper class male perspective - I found myself bristling often because of the insensitivity in this regard.