David Putnam’s "Catastrophically Confused Calvinism" Offers a Dive Into the Origins of Why America is as It is Through the Lens of a French Priest Names Calvin
Summary
Extensively traveled with over five thousand public speaking engagements on five continents, Dr. Putnam is an adventurer who has crawled in and around the pyramids of Egypt, slogged through the jungles of the Amazon, explored underwater caves for lost civilizations, and has a love of aviation. Currently, Dr. Putnam holds the position of pastoral fellow at Ormond College, the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he resides with his wife, Claire.“With the echo of John Calvin’s voice yet reverberating from the walls of St. Pierre’s Cathedral in Geneva, Switzerland, it is easy to imagine puzzled expressions on the faces of his parishioners as they struggled internally to come to grips with what they were hearing from the pulpit,” writes Dr. Putnam. “Calvin never failed to stir controversy; his pen never dipped a second time into the inkwell before issues were raised and battle lines were drawn in the theological sand.“His ideas about God and Scripture were critiqued and debated among theologians, engaged by historians and sociologists, and preached by clergy well into the twenty-first century. Yet it shaped the colonies of the new world; framed thinking as the founding fathers authored the Constitution of the United States; affected society’s views about slavery, leading into the American Civil War; and today has pulled the strings from behind the curtain of culture, making science, the arts, academia, the media, entertainment, religion, and the rule of governments all over the world dance like so many marionettes in a children’s puppet show.“Calvin’s distinctive theological ideas seemed to have a unique propensity to evoke cultural and linguistic absolutes, often leading to extremes in their applications, perhaps in ways that Calvin himself never intended. These distorted extremes created a sort of cultural rainbow overarching societal skies in Europe, spreading to the United States, and through America’s influence, now extending around the world.