Category: Evangelical Calvinist

Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and many others are attempting to renew the church through retrieving their reading of the Protestant Reformation. All they are really doing is retrieving Roman Catholic neo-Thomism, and the attending medieval categories therein, as the balm of Gilead they believe such retrieval will accomplish for the failing evangelical church. And yet this is the irony: they are simply promoting a substance metaphysics, and the decretal God therefrom, which the OG reformers were intent on dismantling in the name of Christ and revelation. TF Torrance underscores these matters for us: That is what happened at the Reformation….

Some jackalope came at me on X/Twitter a few days ago. He said he has been a reader of mine for years; even praying for me (which apparently makes him all knowledgeable on my life and motivations). He appears to be an Orthodox person, with a foul and aggressive mouth (behind the keyboard). His main attack on me was based on the premise that I don’t start what I finish: that I, “bail.” You cannot be more absurd and presumptuous. One of the things he said that I consistently bail on is my education; starting but never finishing. Assertions abound…

The Lord seemed to be pressing me last night to dig even deeper. I had already given it my best shot to punch holes through the credibility and viability of the institution I was getting, or had gotten the ThD from (I had thought). It’s an absolute quagmire, and news worthy. In fact, it is in the news in Maryland. I was working with Dr. Fred Macharia and Dr. Enrique Ramos, particularly through a connection Fred had made with the University of America Curacao. It was through this University (and a subsidiary school called Salt Lake Bible College) that I…

Definitions are important; if for no other reason but to understand what something means. Context provides meaning, and thus definition, for words; whether that is in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, so on and so forth. When attempting to understand where a particular theologian lies, as far as classification, within the alternative types of being a theologian, it is important that we get a handle on the definitions used to ascertain that. In the medieval period, generally, a theologian could be classified as a scholastic theologian, or a Christian humanist; or potentially, both, depending on the way someone enters into the…

When I first started blogging years ago (circa 2005) many of my posts were pretty short; I’d say approximately 500 words or less. As the years have progressed they have gotten longer, and thus take a little more time and work to write. What would you all prefer. Shorter more frequent posts, or longer less frequent? I’m just curious. It will probably remain the same either way , but I am always interested in what my readers think on such things. Athanasian Reformed

When the work of Christ is separated from the person of Christ, all you can be left with are either pure Pelagian or semi-Pelagian doctrines of salvation; as that becomes funded by some functional type of an adoptionistic christology (e.g., Ebionism etc.) This is why TFT refers to the Latin Heresy: he is referring to theologies, Western-Augustinian ones, that ultimately don’t think salvation, as both objectified and subjectivized in the Monarxia of God in the person of Jesus Christ. When this or that individual person is understood as being “elect” of God, based on an arbitrary and hidden decree of…

Telford Work in his chapter on mapping a modern view of the Holy Spirit offers a really nice index of how that gets expressed under the pressures of secularism. Let me share how he sketches that; this is under a section he calls a Dysteological Pneumatology (think something like a Dystopian doctrine of the Spirit). For Nietzsche these spirits are individual wills vying for power. For Freud they are the dark psychological forces that drives single minds and whole civilizations. Among humanity’s countless groups and subgroups they are the countless human structures that Paul calls stoicheia or “elements” of the…

The following is a highly overlooked point, particularly with reference to Christian theology. What, or more pointedly, Who is theology’s control? The answer to this question drives what I attempt to be all about, when it comes to doing prayerful and dialogical theology. We could ask this question another way: is there an order, a taxis, to doing Christian theology; an order that takes into account a thoughtful and intentional theological ontology? These are important questions, and ones that I rarely see engaged with within the received theologies of much of evangelical Lutheran and Reformed theologies. It is just presupposed…

I think part of the problem is that there is a lot of theological insecurity out there, so there is a desire to find stability and safe-haven in a bulwark of theological enterprise that has time and development behind it. The problem with that approach, though, is that time isn’t God. A major aspect of the incarnation of God in Christ is the Revelation that God’s stability is filial and vulnerable. There is a sense of vulnerability and nakedness before God that characterizes God’s relationship with us, and thus ours with Him. Attempting to find repose in the God who…

Here at Athanasian Reformed we often talk about soteriology; indeed, as a nexus interlinked with a whole host of other theological loci, within a theological taxis (order). I was once again reminded by someone on X/Twitter that not everyone thinks these matters through the inner-theological reality present within the warp and woof of Holy Scripture; they simply skim the outer-textual-top and think they have somehow penetrated the marrow therein. But as is the case, the biblical marrow is only gotten at when the reader understands the Bible’s res (reality): i.e., Jesus Christ. When Scripture is “exegeted” through a Ramist place…