[John] Calvin is often identified with his account of predestination. Yet that appears in the third book of his Institutes, not the first.

[John Calvin's] treatment of the person and work of Christ, of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, of prayer and liturgy, of the sacraments, and of the way in which we have an in-built sense of the divine that we suppress to our great sorrow - these are all immense contributions to Christian thought. The same could be said of his commentaries, which are still regularly consulted by biblical critics today.

In many ways the book [Saving Calvinism] is trying to argue for a more popular audience things I've said in some more scholarly works, namely, that the Reformed tradition is broader and more variegated than is often reported today, and that we need to recapture something of this in order that we don't end up unnecessarily narrow in our doctrine and in order to keep some perspective.

We are still living with the consequences of that today in popular Reformed thinking from the likes of John Piper, R. C. Sproul, and Tim Keller.

For those who have only ever read about [John] Calvin, reading the man himself is an invigorating experience.

For instance, there are many mainstream Reformed theologians that deny the doctrine of "limited" atonement (the "L" in TULIP, the acrostic for the Five Points of Calvinism). These are not thinkers on the margins or troublemakers. They are leaders at the center of Reformed thinking like Bishop John Davenant.

[Jonathan Edwards] he has to be engaged with on this issue if you're writing about Calvinism as I am in this book.