Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher.

This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith,

ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You don't have to settle for water down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper,

God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.

If there ever was a topic that I was asked about more than any other topic, this is probably it.

And there is absolutely no way I can cover every single angle in one short episode.

But I do hope that this will give my listeners who maybe are as familiar with either Calvinism

or Arminianism a little bit of an overview and a starting point for your own study of this topic.

Now, I have been studying the topic for over 10 years. I've been at least engaging with it for

more than that, but definitely studying for a significant amount of time. And I love to read

both Calvinist authors and Arminian authors. And I think that's important regardless of where

you land when it comes to your salvation theology. So before we get into what these are as far as

the breakdown of the theological viewpoint, I want to do a little bit of church history and some

defining of terms. Because if you're like, what on earth is a Calvinist? What is an Arminian?

And am I one of those? You probably will have a better idea of where you land by the end of this

episode. But I want to make sure that we start out with some definition of terms in a little bit

of church history because it won't make sense otherwise. The first thing I want to make sure you

understand is that both Calvinism and Arminianism fall within the Orthodox Christian community.

That means that the Calvinist brother is your brother in Christ. The Arminian brother is your

brother in Christ. Now there may be people in either of these camps who aren't walking as if

they were a Christian or maybe don't even fully understand their theology or maybe they're just

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