Category: Evangelical Calvinist

The various phenomena referred to in Holy Scripture, is the same phenomena we experience currently in the world. The world of the Bible, not its ANE (ancient near eastern) parallels, is definitive in regard to the way we think about the world. To use extrabiblical data, and read that into the “gaps” of Scripture, is neither safe nor sound. To speculate is to go beyond the things that have been revealed by God (Deut. 29:29). There is an inner-logic to Scripture, but that is biblical not speculative. This is not to say that gaining an understanding of ANE and Second…

I’m an old man. Just turned 49 yesterday (the 4th). The last year of my 40s. AARP is just around the corner. Athanasian Reformed

This is from chapter 4 of what I presented for my PhD dissertation to Concordia Academic Theology Consortium. As many of you know I gave back that PhD. I am still working on the dissertation (to refine and add to it further), as it looks like it will be considered for another PhD (possibly) at an accredited school. Anyway, here’s a little excerpt: . . . I contend that since all orthodox Christians, in every place, operate with these conciliar categories—two natures/singular person—with reference to Jesus Christ, that it is this fortification, these grammatical loci, that fundamentally give hermeneutical shape…

I happen to believe this. So, what do I happen to believe, you ask? That atheists, when they say they reject God, aren’t rejecting the living God because they can’t without first knowing God; and they can’t first know the living and real God without the Spirit; and if they had the Spirit they would be a Christian; but since they don’t have the Spirit they aren’t Christians; and thus have no capacity to reject the real God. They instead only have the capacity to reject a god who is really just a projection of themselves; no matter how many…

I’m on vacation for the next almost couple of weeks. I won’t be posting during that time, or at least not till the tail-end. May you stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. I’ll see you all on the flip side. Athanasian Reformed

I am a proponent of an evangelical theology. ‘Evangelical’ in the sense that the starting point for theology, I contend, ought to be the Evangel or Gospel Hisself. This is contrary to the philosophical, or hard metaphysical theologies that have characterized much of the Western tradition’s theologizing for centuries (i.e., we could think of Thomas Aquinas all the way into Nietzsche et al.) An ‘evangelical theology’ is a kerygmatic theology; particularly when we understand that the kerygma is the pronouncement and announcement that Jesus is Lord. It is a theology of the Father who declares, “this is my dearly beloved…

As usual, in the right online environs, the Calvinist-Arminian (Provisionist) debate has carried on unabated by not actually engaging with the actual entailments of a real-life Calvinist-Arminian theology. In other words, what the reader will find, are people who are in this interminable joust, oriented by the five points of Calvinism, or not. There is a free-flow exchange between favorite prooftexts, and their ostensible exegesis, and/or an intractable debate about this or that philosophical understanding vis-à-vis God’s sovereignty and human agency in freewill. I am almost positive that everyone reading here is well aware of what I am referring to….

As I have been rereading TF Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, I came across a passage that struck me as a sort of theological-exegetical gloss of Romans 8:31-39. Torrance is often accused of not doing any biblical-exegetical work; but I would counter, that in his role as a Christian Dogmatist his work is saturated in the thematics that allow Scripture to say what it does about God and His works. I would contend that, Torrance, as a Christian Dogmatist, par excellence, has Scriptural themes and their reality in Christ, pervading all of his writings. What…

Barth is often depicted as a liberal or “neoorthodox” theologian who repudiates the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, which alone anathematizes him for the evangelical. Barth is often presented as an enemy to conservative orthodox Christianity, with his neo-Kantian, reified Hegelianism ripping to shreds any hope of giving the evangelical churches anything wholesome and genuinely biblical to cogitate upon. Barth, in many sectors of the evangelical and Reformed churches, is considered as enemy of the state to the health and well-being of historically orthodox Christianity. Barth is often demonized, caricaturized, and flambéed just at the point that someone moves their lips into…

  Theology done by people in the depths of suffering looks much different than theology done by people who are relatively comfortable. When I say “theology” I mean anything anyone thinks or does towards the magnification of Jesus Christ. And this might not even be a conscious effort, especially for those in the thralls of suffering. Indeed, it is in these seasons, when “we have the sentence of death on us so that we will learn to trust the One who raises the dead,” that we are simply living out of the depths of Christ’s life for us (ecstatic existence);…