It is high time that Christians everywhere dropped our unfruitful habit of debate over minutiae. It has not added a whit to our grace, peace or service to the cause of the gospel. I refer to the arguments and polemics of the Reformation era, and I specifically include in that the decrees of the Council of Trent. It is, for instance, time for Calvinists to allow the bare possibility that some people are predestined to be Arminians, and move on. There were wrongs on both sides, and on every side, in the sordid period that gave us a fractured Western church and the Thirty Years War. What happened? We placed too much faith in reasoned argument. We were seduced by philosophy, to the point that we even believed that having a superior argument (as we see it) justifies uncharity, division, and even hatred, war and murder. If your zeal for the gospel leads you to hatred or arrogance, you have not understood the very thing you are arguing about. The fruit of this tree is bitter. Shall we co...
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