Hi there! This a podcast where two guys talk about the journey of life and faith. We explore issues in the world together, and issues in Christianity. And how they're more messy than they seem!

We've been wanting to look at the history of what we know of as "modern church" for a while now because we know that one of the biggest problems these days is that Christians don't know the history of how and why their church life and the things said by the pastor each week have been informed by very specific history that has altered and shifted and re-purposed itself for the last 500 years. We are going to present all 500 of those years in all their pain and glory, shedding light on why certain churches these days believe what they believe.

This episode furthers what was uncovered about the Protestant Reformation; how the socio-political nature of the movement gave way to something much more theological by the works of John Calvin. As such, "Calvinism" was invented, which is a term that denotes the theological belief in certain principles regarding God's election and predestination.

This then leads into clarifying the movement that countered this, Arminianism, formed by Jacobus Arminius, which sought to suggest that one's salvation still depends on performance in life after receiving spiritual knowledge of election.

These two strands of thought are what led to the two most prominent figures of the first Evangelical Revival of the 18th Century, John Wesley and George Whitefield, as Wesley was an Arminian and Whitefield was a Calvinist. Both men had such a huge impact on the world that these worldviews were adopted by those they preached to, causing evangelicalism to fall under the two brought camps of "Calvinist" or "Arminian".