I think we get hung up on the speaker/preacher a bit too often, but Piper's been so prevalent the last 20 years it's easy to pull his material, and he's fairly 'orthodox' overall for high calvinists. I have a digital book, "Whosoever will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism" from 2010 by David L. Allen & Steve W. Lemke.
It's basically written as a skeptical critique of Calvinism, but I chuckle at some of the parts that show the lack of real study/seriousness/education/training in Protestantism in America today/15 years ago (on all sides). I can't paste images but here is one such example;
It's tough on message boards to convey a message kindly without sounding harsh/condemning of others, but I think it's a fair (only around 280 pages) critique overall from some well learned authors.
It's basically written as a skeptical critique of Calvinism, but I chuckle at some of the parts that show the lack of real study/seriousness/education/training in Protestantism in America today/15 years ago (on all sides). I can't paste images but here is one such example;
Quote:
A distinction can be drawn between one who is a Calvinist or Reformed (that is, someone who embraces all or most of the doctrines of Calvinism) and one who is Calvinistic (that is, someone who embraces some doctrines of Calvinism). Some Baptists are Calvinistic in their soteriology but not Calvinist in the Reformed sense of the term. Richard A. Muller, as a former member of the Calvin Theological Seminary faculty, holds indisputable Calvinist credentials. He has debunked in Calvin Theological Journal the notion that evangelicals such as Baptists who think of themselves as Calvinists can appropriately claim to be Calvinists simply because they believe in the five points of Calvinist soteriology:
I once met a minister who introduced himself to me as a "five-point Calvinist." I later learned that, in addition to being a self-confessed five-point Calvinist, he was also an anti-paedobaptist who assumed that the church was a voluntary association of adult believers, that the sacraments were not means of grace but were merely "ordinances" of the church, that there was more than one covenant offering salvation in the time between the Fall and the eschaton, and that the church could expect a thousand-year reign on earth after Christ's Second Coming but before the end of the world. He recognized no creeds or confessions of the church as binding in any way. I also found out that he regularly preached on the "five points" in such a way as to indicate the difficulty in finding assurance of salvation: He often taught his congregation that they had to examine their repentance continually in order to determine whether they had exerted themselves enough in renouncing the world and in "accepting" Christ. This view of Christian life was totally in accord with his conception of the church as a visible, voluntary association of "born again" adults who had "a personal relationship with Jesus."
In retrospect, I recognize that I should not have been terribly surprised at the doctrinal context or at the practical application of the famous five points by this ministeralthough at the time I was astonished. After all, here was a person, proud to be a five-point Calvinist, whose doctrines would have been repudiated by Calvin. In fact, his doctrines would have gotten him tossed out of Geneva had he arrived there with his brand of "Calvinism" at any time during the late sixteenth or the seventeenth century. Perhaps, more to the point, his beliefs stood outside of the theological limits presented by the great confessions of the Reformed churcheswhether the Second Helvetic Confession of the Swiss Reformed church or the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism of the Dutch Reformed churches or the Westminster standards of the Presbyterian churches. He was, in short, an American evangelical.
Muller disdained "Particular Baptists" such as John Gill because Gill did not embrace the rest of the Calvinist doctrines.8 To be fully Calvinistic (Reformed) requires much more than the five points often associated with the Synod of Dort. For Muller, to be truly a Calvinist requires the affirmation of other beliefs such as the baptism of infants, the identification of sacraments as means of grace, and an amillennial eschatology.9 When these additional Calvinist doctrines "are stripped away or forgotten," Muller laments, "the remaining famous five make very little sense."10 From the perspective of a true Calvinist, Baptists are modified Calvinists at best. Nobody in the SBC measures up to this standard of Calvinism. The SBC has Southern Baptists who are Calvinistic in some aspects of their soteriology but Southern Baptist Calvinists do not endorse all doctrines of Reformed theology.
It's tough on message boards to convey a message kindly without sounding harsh/condemning of others, but I think it's a fair (only around 280 pages) critique overall from some well learned authors.