Letters to a Young Calvinist Quotes

“In fact, I must tell you that in the past couple years I’ve become convinced that perhaps nothing is so important for our walk with the Lord as good friends. I think God gives us good friends as sacraments – means of grace given to us as indices of God’s presence and conduits for our sanctification.”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

“It is Augustine who is really the patron saint of the Reformation – and only because the Reformers saw Augustine’s theology as a powerful expression of a robustly Pauline theology. So without wanting to sound overly pious or triumphant, I think it is very important to see that “Reformed theology” was not a sixteenth-century invention. It was a recovery and rearticulation of a basically Augustinian worldview, which was itself first and foremost an unpacking of Paul’s vision of what it meant that Christ is risen.”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

“How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity.”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

“However, in looking back at the enthusiasm of my younger, newly Calvinist self, I also cringe at the rough edges of my spiritual hubris – an especially ugly vice. The simple devotion of my brothers and sisters became an occasion for derision, and I spent an inordinate amount of time pointing out the error of their (“Arminian”) ways. How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity. I had become a caricature of the unforgiving servant in Jesus’s parable (Matt. 18:23–35). At times, I saw creeping versions of the same pride in these young folks I spent time with in Los Angeles – an arrogance I understood but also abhorred. And in this particular case, there seemed to be something in their Calvinism that gave comfort to wider cultural notions of machismo that did not reflect the radical grace and mercy of the gospel.”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

“This is why Luther and Calvin still understood themselves to be “catholics.” While they might have been railing against the abuses of Roman Catholicism, they also understood themselves to be heirs of the catholic, universal, orthodox faith. In fact, I think we can best understand the Reformation as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic. So, in a way that might be surprising, to be Reformed is to be catholic. Traditionally”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition