[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.

How many people in the pews know that [ Jonathan Edwards] is both a founder of evangelicalism and, say, an idealist who denied that the material world exists?

The atonement chapter [from the book Saving Calvinism] shows how there are real riches in Reformed theology that most Christians today have no idea about.

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.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not rubbishing penal substitution. But there are other options that have been advocated by Reformed thinkers of the past.

For those interested in Reformed thought more broadly, I'd recommend Peter Leithart's recent book on Reformed Catholicism entitled, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Brazos Press, 2016), as a thought-provoking and stimulating read that should get us all thinking about the future shape of the Church, wherever we come from.

We may think that our tradition is exactly the same as it has always been, but that is an illusion.