Adam Weinstein on gawker covers the recently deceased Fred Phelps and his rampant Calvinism:
The broad theology of WBC can be summed up in one basic statement:
Everybody sucks.
Only awful, terrible, despicable, depraved people would cause a political hatemongering ruckus at a funeral or an elementary school. That’s absolutely true. The thing is, the faithful of Westboro Baptist Church would be the first to claim that they’re depraved—and so is everyone else. This is the bedrock of their belief system, laid out on their website:
These doctrines of grace were well summed up by John Calvin in his 5 points of Calvinism… Although these doctrines are almost universally hated today, they were once loved and believed, as you can see in many confessions of faith. Even though the Arminian lies that “God loves everyone” and “Jesus died for everyone” are being taught from nearly every pulpit in this generation, this hasn’t always been the case. If you are in a church that supposedly believes the Bible, and you are hearing these lies, then your church doesn’t teach what the Bible teaches.
Also of note, Weinstein’s summery of TULIP:
Basically, five-point Calvinism boils down to: There’s a God who saves some people and screws the rest over for eternity, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. If there were, He wouldn’t be God, and you wouldn’t be a depraved, terrible not-God quivering mass of id urges.
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