Just a quick word: I have, at times, engaged with a guy named Leighton Flowers. He has a relatively large following on you YouTube (29.5 thousand people), and he uses that platform to offer critique of a lowest common denominator or reduced form of Calvinism from his “Provisionist” perspective (what in the past in low church evangelicalism has been referred to as ‘Calminianism’ or in Flowers’ Southern Baptist circles, ‘Traditionalism’). What is strangely ironic to me, given the fact that Leighton purports to be offering critique of Calvinism, is that he never, no never actually engages with classically Reformed theology, or classical Calvinism proper, in its 16^th and 17^th century development. He has a few themes he constantly hits on, like: determinism, total depravity/inability, interpretive tradition, and a few other choice loci.

I simply want to register this as a placeholder post for more developed posts, in critique of Flowers that are forthcoming. How does someone spend ALL of their YouTube time critiquing something without actually engaging with that something’s actual formal and material theological developments? How does someone gloss past the whole history of ideas, as Flowers does, in regard to Calvinism’s historical development, and then pretend to actually be critiquing Calvinism? He constantly trumpets that he wants to present a ‘steel man’ not a ‘straw man’ when representing competing perspectives from his; that he wants to give the best and most accurate representation of Calvinism that he can, before he sets out on critiquing it. But he doesn’t actually do that with Calvinism. He appeals to the popular (which his YouTube following is indicative of) who doesn’t know any better, and then acts like he is fairly engaging with Calvinism; but anyone who knows the history of Calvinism, and its theological development, knows that Flowers isn’t seriously engaging with the best of classical Calvinism—which is why he never really attracts serious interaction with real life Calvinist scholars (James White doesn’t count).

Anyway, like I said, more to come. I myself have clearly been a critic of classical Calvinism, long before Flowers in fact (at least online). But what we have attempted to do is to actually engage with real life Reformed theology, and recognize how within that total tradition, there are numerous eddies of development. But what I have criticized has been the developments known as Federal or Covenantal theology; this is Calvinist theology. To simply hone in on a popular development of Calvinism, like the 5 points represent, is not to offer a real critique of Calvinist theology. Indeed, it is highly reductionistic and sweeping to engage in this sort of critique. I think what irks me most about Flowers’ approach is that he presents himself as a fair and honest guy simply offering a real life critique of something that isn’t actually representative of what he says he is critiquing. But the masses, who follow him, don’t know any better; so goes the online world (as I write a post for the online world). More to come.