This is my first book review but I plan to do many more in future posts. As the title states, this is a review of Ken Wilson's work, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism. From my understanding this is an abridgment of his doctoral dissertation. The book is a fairly quick read and I sort of wish he had just published his full dissertation instead, though I'm sure it's available somewhere.
To just lay it out there, the book is very good and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of what Dr. Wilson calls Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals's Eternal Destinies (DUPIED). This is a more specific title than what we usually just call predetermined salvation.
Dr. Wilson explains the history of the strange idea that people are forced into Heaven or Hell before they are born without allowing them any free-will in the matter at all. This is a belief of Calvinism or "reformed theology." The book explains where this idea came from and when it first appeared in Christian writings. It isn't very surprising (though the book's detailed analysis of it is very interesting) to read that Calvinistic ideas didn't appear until about 400 years after Christ's resurrection! Until that time, there had been a reasonable and Biblical understanding of soteriology.
After Augustine's conversion to Christianity, he initially (several decades I believe) defended the traditional view of salvation by grace through faith to whosoever would believe on the Lord Jesus Christ against pagan and heretical views that rejected any kind of free-will. Later on, after 400 A.D., Augustine switched his stance and began agreeing with the pagans and heretics on their soteriological views! Thus, the pagan view that rejected free-will entered Christianity.
Thus we can see that the popular theological position known today as Calvinism is strictly unbiblical and heretical. It has no place in our Church today.
See https://soteriology101.com/ for more info on this.
One gripe I have with this book, and with Dr. Wilson, is that for some reason he insists on using "BCE" and "CE" when describing dates rather than the Christ-centered and traditional B.C./A.D. The terms BCE & CE are entirely secular and seek to erase Christ from history. Before Christ and Anno Domini are the correct terms to use. Ironically enough, even though BCE/CE attempt to remove Christ from discussion, the dates still center around His birth!
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