March 24, 1999

Calvinism misses
point of grace, speaker says
___FORT WORTH--Looking at God's grace through a Calvinistic view is missing what God means by grace, a pastor told students at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary March 4.
___"Calvinism presents a God who arbitrarily selects some to be saved and some to be lost," Frank Page, pastor of Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga., said in a chapel sermon. Grace, he said, is not a term of selection but an expression of love and acceptance.
___Calvinism is a theological system outlined by the 17th century Reformer John Calvin. It is built around five central points, of which the most controversial is the notion that Christ died only to save certain people and not others.
___Proponents of Calvinism--a growing group among Southern Baptists today, including the presidents of two Southern Baptist seminaries--often call their theology "doctrines of grace." But Page asserted the Calvinistic perspective misses the most important nature of grace.
___"It portrays a nature of God who is capricious and even cruel in his selection of those who would be elect and non-elect," he said.
___Page cautioned that by seeing a God who selects his children randomly with no concern for the lost, Christians are not genuinely seeing who God is.

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