Category: Evangelical Calvinist

I am contemplating making the jump to a different host for my online writing. WordPress, my current host, has become more focused on commercial websites than on blogging these days. My concern is that WordPress may discontinue support for blogging all together someday, and I’ll be out to lunch. Substack seems to offer the best alternative. It’s services are free (here I pay a minimal amount for ad free posting), and it offers a built in network and community. It also operates off of a newsletter premise, so when you subscribe you receive my post directly as newsletter recipients (I…

I have decided to migrate over to Substack, as I was contemplating in my last post. I will leave this blog up, of course!, with all of its archives intact. I have exported all of my posts, and I believe comments, over to my Substack (I think it is still in the process of processing all of that). I hope all of my readers and subscribers will follow me over to my new online writing home. It will still be the same type of material as I’ve engaged with here over the years, just on a different platform (with I…

How does the Christian know the depth of sin; how does anyone? How does a Christian have knowledge of themselves; how does anyone? According to Scripture we only know the depth of human sin through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. To think sin, to think humanity even, from any other ground than the ground of God’s Light of Light for the world in Jesus Christ will give us a skewed sense, a perverted perspective on just who we are as fallen humanity. Until we come to the realization and understanding of the depth dimension of our status as fallen creatures,…

Even as a Christian, nearly 30yrs ago, I went through a season of extreme spiritual and intellectual doubt. It was as if the heavens were bronze, as if closed. That in my attempt to think and talk with God, it felt as if my words and thoughts would only make it as high as this bronze ceiling; as if the God I was ostensibly worshipping was merely a projection of my own wants and wishes. But I came to realize—through God’s grace and persistence—that in fact the Heavens are always open; indeed, that the veil of the flesh of Christ’s…

Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The…

I was going to write a post on Jesus as the Israel of God; on Jesus as the new humanity of God, who in fact is the Son of David, in all the scandalous particularity that ought evoke. But as I began to index the various passages I might use to make this case I thought it more organic to simply lay them out, with the emboldened sections intended to highlight how I might make the case for Jesus as Israel. He is not some transcendent extra, some Gnostic ethereal demiurge, some link between heaven and earth (as merely an…

Reading Holy Scripture is an exceedingly dialogical event. That is to say, reading Scripture takes place in the relationship that co-inheres between the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ for us; it is a con-versational happenstance that reposes in the context of God’s eternal and triune life. This entails that as the Christian reads the Bible they are engaging in an organic and inter-personal contact with the very author of said readings. As Jesus said: He would not leave us as orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit; the Comforter, the come-along-sider who will bring us into all truth; who…

I have been asked many many times over the years how Evangelical Calvinism is different than classical Calvinism (i.e., Federal theology, 5-point Calvinism etc.). There are a few ways to try and answer that; but an important way is to signal the type of theological methodology we follow (contra the competing traditions out there). Us, Athanasian Reformed look directly to Calvin—unlike the Post Reformed orthodox, ironically—in order to distill the various themes that help fund what we are attempting with this project. As Providence would have it (Christ conditioned Providence, that is), I am rereading John Webster’s little book (one…

… dogmatics offers a means of producing a portrait of the economy of grace, and of humankind and its activities in that economy, free from anxieties about foundations and therefore at liberty to devote itself to the descriptive task with Christian alertness, charity and joy.[1] Christian Dogmatics — the church’s orderly understanding of scripture and articulation of doctrine in the light of Christ and their coherence in him.[2] If the Church is going to do Church theology, what both Webster and Torrance, respectively, are signaling above, is of the upmost importance to grasp. When Christians do theology, by definition, we aren’t…

The following is a post I wrote over ten years ago, for another blog of mine (back then), in an attempt to help people, at a very basic level, understand how Evangelical Calvinism (Athanasian Reformed theology) is distinct from classical Calvinism and Arminianism (and any other sub-set developments under that). It is very simply stated, but hopefully this will help some understand what the project of Evangelical Calvinism entails in more straightforward ways. The way, when in person with someone, that I have tried to describe what Evangelical Calvinism is, is to contrast it with what most people think of Calvinism…