Category: Evangelical Calvinist

The following are three vignettes on Theological Exegesis or Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) that I just posted today on Facebook. I think, in the main, so many Christians are so far removed from all things theological or actual, when it comes to excavating the reality of the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, that when some do attempt deep dives into such things they simply attempt to apply “common-sense” everyday linguistic and cultural reading theories onto the text of Scripture that Scripture itself resists. Scripture is Holy because its reality is in Jesus Christ. Scripture is…

As a radical Protestant I am a theologian of a radical theology of the Word. This means that I first understand the Word, to be the eternal Logos, the begotten Son in the bosom of the Father. I understand his free election (Deus incarnandus) to be for us to entail what has become the written and proclaimed Word. So, the creaturely media, such as written and proclaimed Words are, in order, at least for the former to be living and active, requires that its res or reality be antecedently given in and from the eternally living and active Word of…

I have been accepted into the PhD program in Systematic and Historical Theology at St. Alcuin House Seminary, an Anglican institution of the Benedictine order in the Communion of Anglican Churches. I’ll give more details as I have them. They have been accredited in the past, and are currently in application for renewing their accreditation (I believe the accreditation comes through Cambridge Assessment International Education of Cambridge University). Athanasian Reformed

God is not “a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind.”[1] And yet, enter the fray of theological social media, enter the faculty lounges across many seminaries and divinity schools, or simply attempt to learn of God with more depth by reading theology books unawares (i.e., without critical resource to know otherwise), and you will end up coming up against a notion of God that has nothing do with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Whether that notion be informed by the scholasticism of Aristotelian or scholastic vintage, or it be of more…

5 One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. 7 For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; 8 for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died…

The God of classical Calvinism and Arminianism is the same God, in the sense that their respective doctrines of God find resource in what Richard Muller identifies as ‘Christian Aristotelianism.’ How the Christian thinks of God will determine all else following, theologically. Since the actus purus (‘pure being’) god of Aristotle stands structurally and materially behind the way that Calvinism and Arminianism generally conceive of a God-world relation, what happens is that they must construct a system wherein this God remains untouched by said creation/world. In this effort, said systems have come to think of this God-world relation through a…

Here is some TF Torrance on the way he thinks the natural sciences and theological science might relate; might even complement each other from their own distinctive verities. . . . theological science and natural science have their own proper and distinctive objectives to pursue, but their work inevitably overlaps, for they both respect and operate through the same rational structures of space and time, while each develops special modes of investigation, rationality, and verification in accordance with the nature and the direction of its distinctive field. But since each of them is the kind of thing it is as…

I just noticed that my blog just went over a million hits. Thank you to all my readers and lurkers for making this blog what it is. I started blogging full time in 2005, and in the first four years of my blogging I foolishly moved around from url to url, to this new blog and that one. I eventually stuck with this one starting in 2009, and it has remained a place of refuge for me; in regard to being able to unload my thoughts in written form. I plan on blogging until the Lord returns, or He takes…

It is true that on the Deist view, God can also help us in another way. The very contemplation of his goodness in his works inspires us, and energizes us to do his will. Thus as the calm and most extensive determination of the soul towards the universal happiness can have no other centre of rest and joy than the original independent omnipotent Goodness; so without the knowledge of it, and the most ardent love and resignation to it, the soul cannot attain to its most stable and highest perfection and excellence. [Frances Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, p. 217]…

“Human righteousness, in whatever form it is found, is a Tower of Babel.” “Religion—and Barth is here speaking pre-eminently of Christianity—is at its heart, an exercise in self-delusion.” -Bruce McCormack, on Barth’s theology[1]   This is hard teaching, who wants to hear it? The first clause (above) conditions the second in Barth’s theology. He is referring to the role that human subjectivity plays in the construction of religion. We create expressions, settings, bells and whistles, verbiage, pews, cathedrals, flying buttresses, smiles (even while in agony), so on and so forth. In the end, do any of these things bring us…