Christ's work is a kind of deterrent to us, and a way of upholding the justice of God's divine government of the world.

It is often reported that the Five Points of Calvinism are the conceptual hard-core of Reformed thought. That is very misleading. The Five Points supposedly originate with the Synod of Dort in the early seventeenth century. Yet we find important Reformed leaders who were signatories to that documentation who don't think that limited atonement is the right way to think about the scope of Christ's saving work. How can this be? The answer that recent historical theology has thrown up is that the canons of the Synod don't require adherence to the doctrine of limited atonement.

The book [Saving Calvinism] itself is not recommending that we move the borders, so to speak. It is recommending that we look at what lies within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought.

[ Jonathan] Edwards is the person who really made theological determinism a serious option for Reformed thinkers, and the influence his views had in nineteenth century Reformed thought, in the USA and the UK in particular, is enormous.

These days I'm often called a Deviant Calvinist, but I don't really think my views do deviate from the Reformed tradition, though in some respects they may represent views that are not as popular now as they once were, or that may represent a minority report in the tradition.

That is the great contribution of Reformed thinking to the Christian church: theology for a life well-lived.

The alternative of hypothetical universalism, according to which Christ's work is sufficient for all but efficient only for the elect, was alive and well in early Reformed thought. Moreover - and importantly for our purposes - this view was not regarded as an aberration but as a legitimate position that could be taken within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought. But that means that the Five Points aren't the non-negotiable conceptual core of Calvinism after all.