Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Salvation Part 1.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we begin a new locus, or section, in our survey of Christian doctrine. Some of you may remember

that years ago when we first began this course, I said that we would be structuring our

material along the lines of the so-called loki communes of classical Protestant theology.

These loki communes were the chief places or chief themes of Protestant scholastic theology.

They would include things like the doctrine of Revelation, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of creation,

doctrine of man, doctrine of Christ, and so forth. And we've surveyed these so far. Today we

come to a new section in our course on the doctrine of salvation. Now this locus lies at the very

heart of Christian theology because it addresses a problem that we've already been

discussing namely our sin and guilt before a holy and righteous God, and how God has chosen

to deal with it in order to bring about our salvation. Now, as with every aspect of Christian doctrine, the doctrine of salvation is also a matter

of controversy. So we want to begin by looking at the doctrine of election, first from a Calvinist

point of view and then from an Armenian point of view.

I'm not going to be discussing the original views of the Swiss reformer John Calvin, or the Dutch theologian

Yaakov Arminius. This isn't an attempt to do historical theology. Rather, we're going to look at

what passes under their names in theology today, which is done in a Calvinist mode or in an

Armenian mode. So what we'll do is look at a couple of key New Testament

passages, first from a Calvinistic perspective and then also from an Armenian perspective

and see the difference in the way that these two schools of thought interpret these key

passages. Let's begin with the doctrine of election from a Calvinistic point of view. Here I would

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