March 26th Meeting on DEBATING CALVINISM

The book: DEBATING CALVINISM by James White and Dave Hunt.
This meeting was well attended with Rick, Juli (my wife), Yours truly, and wayward former regular reader Keith. Only Rick and I are reading the book but the others wanted to join in on the conversation. This is the third forray of the group into the subject of Free Will versus Determinism. Previously we had read WILLING TO BELIEVE by R. C. Sproul and FREEDOM OF THE WILL (aka A Careful and Strict Inquiry Into Those Modern Prevailing Notions on That Freedom of the Will that is Supposed to be Essential to Reward and Punishment, Virtue and Vice, Praise and Blame) by Jonathan Edwards. Our new Redeem the Time program will permit more such reading in theology as our interests dictate.

I found DEBATING CALVINISM to be a fair representation of both sides of this Christian debate. The debate format proved to be perfect for allowing the reader to hear the arguments in parallel with the counter arguments, instead of having to read two books and trying to remember the points made in one while reading the next. I doubt this book will change the mind of anyone firmly entrenched on either side, but it certainly sets the evidence in plain sight. Of course, having once been an Arminian myself, I found the non-Calvinist arguments of Dave Hunt to be infuriating, but quite faithful to the opposition's side of the argument. Many items were not dealt with at length due to size restrictions. I would recommend this book to any believer wanting to discover the foundational reasons for being a Calvinist, or an Arminian, or as Dave Hunt styles himself a "non-Calvinist." I have compiled many notes on this subject that should prove useful in discussing this topic with members of the opposition. I haven't yet decided how much of my comments I will post on this subject as they are quite lengthy and form part of a much larger project I am working on to be called DEUS VULT (God gets what He wants).

Sola Fide,

=Doug Eigsti March 30th 2005=

Doug talks about the HMTP additions

HMTP Updated Wolfe and Niven

I finally got my home computer working well enough to recreate the updates for the HMTP that we discussed at the last Fictionados meeting. In it you will find several short story collections by Gene Wolfe that the group had heretofore neglected; and we call ourselves Wolfe fans? We will try to tackle one of Wolfe's collections each year as soon as we complete The Wizard Knight series.

Also added is Larry Niven's "Magic" series. Niven began this series as just a few short stories back in the 1960's but Niven and Pournelle have now added a new novel. "Magic" is now up to three full sized volumes. It is time we checked in on Niven.

Note too, the additions of a couple of Card books about Ender, and a final Worldwar book from Turtledove.

I have also updated my "Ranked List" to include Baxter's Raft. See where I have placed it in comparison to all the other science fiction novels I have read. You may also find some titles to be of interest that I have read but have not been discussed by the group.

Read on,

=Doug=