Who do I argue against?

I noticed as I read through The One Story (the book, not the blog) recently that I didn’t explicitly say that my arguments are usually directed against (or for, sometimes) tendencies found in American churches that are not necessarily advanced in works of academic theology. (My my, that was a long sentence, John!) To find examples, just look for where I get peevish, and the upsetting tendenz will often be what folks in the pew believe, not what university and seminary professors write for each other.
The clearest instance, to me, is in the section titled “For Other Wills” beginning on page 61. There I argue not against serious defenses of Reformed theology but against expressions of a determinism that might be traceable to some sort of Calvinism but can be heard among the Mennonites and Methodists I hang out with as easily as among Presbyterians.
Among “serious defenders” of Reformed theology I think first of Bruce Ware because in what I’ve read he’s particularly well-informed and gracious and because I knew him back in student days. The “what I‘m arguing against” in “For Other Wills” I characterize as “complete determinism” and “dislike for multiple causes” and as reflected in the slogan “God is in control of everything” and in assorted unreflective statements about “God’s will” (pages 62–63; another example includes my citations of Joyce Meyer and Plain Truth Ministries on page 194). All this is part of the distance between the official theologies and the popular theologies of many churches and denominations.
This business of fussing over popular theologies comes out of a shift in my focus that happened over a couple years three decades or so ago. In simplest terms, since then I care about churches and the fascinating variety of people in them more than (perhaps rather than) academia, even though I wrote The One Story for seminary students, not everybody.
There’s another what-I-was-doing-but-didn’t-explicitly-say-so that came up when I was rereading, but it deserves its own post. So stay tuned.