On the topic of Piper and his Calvinism, I ran across a discussion of Calvinist theology in Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire, a history of the British Civil War. Apparently one of Calvin’s disciples, Theodore Beza, did take the theology to the logical extreme. He was a determinist, and he argued that everything that occured in life was all according to God’s inscrutable design, right down to the fall of Adam and Eve.

This position was not widely embraced. Braddick explains:

Clever theologians, like expensive lawyers, are adept at failing to push arguments too far and there were many respectable positions short of the one adopted by Beza.

Interesting comparison.

In America, the questions put to Calvinist theologians were about the principle of election. Are there babies who died in infancy roasting in hell simply because they were not of the elect? The implications of the theology would seem to lead to that conclusion, but the Calvinist preachers stopped short of spelling that out.