The Gospel Coalition was kind to publish a piece of mine on a few ways I’ve been influenced by reading and listening to Reformed authors and teachers. Here’s the intro:
C. S. Lewis once cautioned against the blindness inherent in every age. Like others in our day, he warned, we are “specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” For Lewis, the solution was reading old books. New books share the presuppositions of our time; old books challenge our generational narrow-mindedness. The same warning could be issued with regard to theological tradition. If we read only those who share our basic framework and agree with us on most things, then we nurture devotional and theological nearsightedness. To counteract this tendency, we ought to be disciplined in reading other traditions and perspectives, not just to critique them but also to discover what we can take in from them. We may be surprised to find how much we have to learn.
I’m a United Methodist pastor, but I’ve learned a lot from reading Reformed authors and listening to Reformed preachers. While we certainly disagree on some important matters, we also stand together in the broad stream of Protestant orthodoxy. I’ve learned there is great wisdom and insight to be gained from Reformed voices both past and present. Here are three ways in particular that I’ve benefited from the Reformed tradition.
Click through to find out what those three things are.
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