Today we're going to get started with discussing Calvinism, Doctrines of Grace. And what I want to start with is a quick snapshot from you about your own interest in the topic and your own history as a background discovering where you are today. Yeah, thanks, Clark. It's great to be here. So yeah, I started off in Calvinism when I was pretty young. I was born and raised in Southern California. And in Southern California, it's pretty well known for its megachurches.
And one of the mega churches that I was quite influenced by through the radio and through books was John MacArthur. And so John MacArthur is pretty well recognized to be one of the forefathers of the resurgence of Calvinism. So he and John Piper and a handful of others. And I remember my dad had a copy of one of his books in our house. Now my dad is not a Calvinist, but he had one of his books around and I started to read it and got pretty interested in it. And I listened to quite a bit of Christian radio.
I ended up working in Christian radio for about three years when I was in late high school, early college. And the airwaves are heavily, heavily dominated by Calvinist people like John MacArthur. And almost by default, almost by osmosis, not necessarily out of a rational, well-thought-out choice, I moved more and more into Calvinism. And I remember having this conversation once with my dad where he was not very happy about that. And I'm grateful that he waved a little bit of a cautionary flag.
And he said, why are you reading these books? Don't be so influenced by Calvinists. And I'll say in hindsight, what I think what happened was here I had my dad's library. He's got a fairly extensive library. He has an MDiv from Fuller Seminary.
And in the context of that library, you know there's a certain set of books that are the ones that I, as a person who enjoys thinking and meaty subjects, I think I gravitated more to those books because those writers in general were meatier, better writers, more structured, more thoughtful. And so it was really that that kind of brought me into it. And so I was there living in that world, but then eventually I started to question it more and more.
So I started to get more into the readings of people like Charles Finney and John Wesley. Charles Finney was kind of a complex person to categorize, but John Wesley was definitely an Arminian, very clear. And as I started to research it and read it now in a more informed way, I could see both sides of it. It became abundantly clear that the Calvinist position was very skewed. And I ended up getting a whole stack of books from the library and just those. Where were you in your life at that point? How old were you?
I was in medical school then. So yeah, I was probably in my mid-20s or so. I was doing my, I did an MD PhD program.
With all your spare time you dove into Yeah, yeah, you know, it's one of those things that you make time for the things that you love and I loved it and it was and it remains to be to me a very engaging topic that I personally think is incredibly important for how you view God, how you think of evil, how you understand events that befall all of us every day, what our view of salvation is, all those things are very closely connected to Calvinism.
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