“In the 1980s, my doctoral dissertation adviser, D. Clair Davis, often said that Calvinism is so comprehensive that it is hard to get one’s mind and arms around it. He would then say, a bit tongue-in-cheek, that this comprehensiveness is one major difference between Lutheranism and Calvinism. Lutheranism could neatly bring all of its confessional statements under one cover in 1580 and call it The Book of Concord. But the Calvinistic faith is so rich that at least three families of confessional statements developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the English-Scottish family, the Dutch-German family, and the Swiss family–none of which contradicted the others but built on and complemented them” (“Preface” by Joel R. Beeke, Living For God’s Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism, xi-xii).