Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed Quotes

“The character of Jesus is the character of God. God would never do something Jesus would find morally reprehensible, so if you can’t find it in Jesus, then you really ought to think twice before you claim you’ve found it in God.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“Faith, doubt, humility, and confidence—this is the stuff and substance of theology at its best. Swagger, smugness, and certainty—this is the stuff and substance of ideology at its worst.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“I believe we best say yes to God's glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“There is a great distance between skepticism and confidence and an equally great distance between confidence and certainty. God helps us bridge the gap between skepticism and confidence, but he doesn’t seem particularly concerned with building us a bridge from confidence to certainty. Due”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worse fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying him. Not even fear. It is true we have his threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.41”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“The God of Romans 9–11 finds ways to show mercy, even when the facts clamor for judgment. This doesn’t sound much like Calvinism to me, but it does sound a whole lot like Jesus.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“Daily Jesus challenges you to follow him up on the cross so your old self can continue to be crucified, and daily you must decide if you will do so. Daily Jesus invites you to join him on mission, reaching out to the lost and the least, and daily you must decide if you will do so.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“An illustration borrowed from Roger Olson might be helpful here. A man has fallen into a pit, is unconscious, and will eventually die. But God calls out to the man and offers help, awakening him from his unconsciousness. God starts pouring water down into the pit and tells the man that if he will just stay still, he can float on the water up to rescue. All the man has to do is not struggle or try to hold on to the bottom. All he has to do to be saved is surrender.117 His “contribution” to his salvation is the contribution of doing nothing.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“I’m not sure anything tells us more about who God is than the great Christological hymn of Philippians 2: Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men . . . He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“And this brings us back to Karl Barth. Towards the end of his life, he made his one and only trip to America, lecturing at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago. Legend has it that at some point Barth was asked to summarize the meaning of the millions of words he had written. He thought for a moment and then said: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Furthermore, if God has determined everything, hasn’t God also determined the sins that he is going to send people to hell forever for? Hasn’t God made sure that people will commit the sins he will then judge them for? If so, how is that just? And then there’s the question that pulls together these issues of love and justice: how is God good? If—before the creation of a single human being—God chose to send people to hell for sins he ordained they would commit, how is he good?”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“People don’t choose Calvinism or free-will theism because one side has clearly proven itself right, but because they “find one set of mysteries easier to live with than the other.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“God is always sovereign, but that means he—and not we—gets to decide what shape that sovereignty takes. And apparently, God’s sovereignty makes room for human freedom so that God and humans can have a personal, and not merely causal, relationship”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“This means Christian theology moves from Jesus to God, and not from what you think you know about God to Jesus. You find God on Jesus’s terms or you find something that isn’t God.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“As Greg Boyd states: Why should we assume that God desires to do everything he has the raw power to do? . . . Scripture makes it evident that though God could control us, he desires to empower us to be self-determining, morally responsible agents. “Whatever the Lord pleases he does,” including creating free agents. 106”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Far from being a treatise meant to justify God’s righteousness in unconditional election, Romans 9–11 is a treatise about the incomprehensible mercy and scandalous faithfulness of God towards his creatures, through the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“[God is] the One who in absolute freedom loves absolutely.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“is easy, particularly if home has been a place of abuse or neglect. But oftentimes leaving home is difficult, especially if home has been a good place. Of course that is what home is meant to be: a good place, a place”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“heart of belief there is a leap. For various biblical, rational, and experiential”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“no misery to be saved from . . . So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“so I have also tried to be honest. And the best way I have found to be honest is to tell you my story: a journey in and out of Calvinism. As Chesterton once confessed, sometimes you have to be egotistical if you want to be sincere.3 In this reminiscing, something became”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“It is often said that one’s theology is not tenable unless it can be preached at the gates of Auschwitz.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism