[mjdiloreto]

I appreciate the humor but this confuses me. I also read in a biography of Thomas Jefferson that he reviled Calvinists, going so far as to say their God is not the God of the Bible. I genuinely do not understand what is so reprehensible about Calvinist doctrine. There is just so much theological noise to parse through whenever I research it. Is pre-determination the biggest issue?

[nine_k]

Yes, the predestination. It removes from humans any agency in their own salvation, and any action of consequence in their lives. Everything is predetermined, the whole world is just a mechanical puppet show.

It's an internally consistent view of the world. But it turns all the biblical events where humans appear to have agency into just silly scripted scenes, and it also turns the passion and self-sacrifice of Christ another scripted scene (with the Gethsemane episode thrown in for sadistic melodrama, apparently).

I'd say that (strict) Calvinism is the least Christian of the various sects that have attained mainstream success. Paradoxically, it produced some very sober and ultimately successful approaches to the earthly life.

[EdwardDiego]

Yeah, predeterminism, along with limited atonement, and perseverance of the saints, combines to form, IMO, a theology that is toxic at best, abusive at worst.

If I can massively oversimplify, it's a theology where Jesus came to redeem only the Elect that God had already chosen to be saved while he had chosen to send everyone else to hell, so that the Elect could see His mercy (to them, not those poor bastards on the down escalator).

And, perseverance of the saints is the icing on the cake, because it came to mean that if you ever disagreed with your church or its elders, well, you obviously weren't one of the Elect at all, enjoy the hellfire.

So it's a great theology if you want to run a small, obviously better than everyone else, in-group of the Saved, vs. all the unsaved sinners God has already condemned.

To see how perverse it could become in the extremes, look at the role it played in apartheid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Calvinism

[Boogie_Man]

Man, multiple people were ready to "go in on" Calvin which really wasn't what I intended. I was recently drafting a little ten part quick and dirty comparison of Christian denominational views on the most important/relevant theological concepts and reading about the Old Lutherans in this post really made me think about how seriously they took these things because they were literally true to them. It is either an admirable or a terrifying thing depending on your perspective.

To answer your question as well as I can from their perspective, the reformed understanding of pneumatic presence vs their understanding of the sacramental union and being forced to participate in the eucharist in that heretical way, would quite literally be grounds for leaving the continent.