I am going to chronicle the journey I began last year in January when I began to investigate basically disproving a book given to me by a friend.  Yeah, now that I say that out loud it sounds wrong, but at the time I thought I was rescuing a brother from errant doctrine.  What I discovered was I really didn’t believe the way I thought I did, no I wasn’t poorly informed about what I believed, just horribly informed on what others would have lumped me in with.  Mostly I see now I didn’t place a great deal of emphasis where I now believe it should have been placed.  And oh well I should just admit it, I flip flopped completely on several issues that I now understand better.  Oddly, in my attempts to defend what I thought the book thought my beliefs were, I found I did not really come down in the camp as a true Armenian. I also discovered a new rich history of information about the God I love, and despite my efforts to deny it, I was left believing that which I was initially attempting to disprove.

The desire to place God as the center and object of my devotions seems plainly silly that I was not already doing that.  But my new discoveries I attribute to God blessing me with the grace to see a better way.  Now I sound emergent, but ironically it is a connection with our church history and prior teachings that I has led me to a new love that I feel compels me to look at the world through God’s perspective, rather than my own.

I believe embracing a “Soli Deo gloria” or “glory to God alone” viewpoint as well as many other differences has made a tremendous improvement on my life, I pray others will ultimately think so as well as I try and live for God, and not for John.  Hopefully I will begin listing some of the observations and scriptural references that affected the change here on Worthy Journey starting this weekend, March 19th, 2011.  I pray it may be informative for others out there who desire to consider the differences between the Armenian and Calvinistic views as viewed by one from what he thought was the Armenian position.  My old position truly wasn’t, albeit it was closer than to Calvinism; which is where a lot of confusion and heated discussion erupted from.  Your welcome and desired to add your thoughts and comments within the process.

SPOILER: I don’t think most people are in jeopardy of being heretical except when they are taken to extremes, if you really are a full Armenian as described by the Remonstrants please consider reviewing them to see if you really are.  I was not. Though I do feel one is more prone to lead to a distorted view of our relationship to God and his will than the other.  But, I know several that seem to have a remarkably reformed thought process for disliking the label Calvinist so.