Category: Evangelical Calvinist

The following is a post I wrote quite a few years ago where I reflect on the implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is both devotional, personal, and a little academic in orientation; but I think it’s fitting for today. Christ is risen! I really struggled with a false sense of guilt and condemnation for particular sins from my past for years upon years. The enemy of my soul kept me living under ‘a yoke of bondage’ that Jesus said I ‘would be free indeed’ from. The Lord did not leave me as an orphan though, by the…

I want to talk about God’s shadow side. The rip against Thomas Torrance, Karl Barth and the Athanasian Reformed is that their respective doctrine of election leads to some form of Christian universalism (some are okay with that). But in fact, it doesn’t. People like Keven Vanhoozer, Robert Letham, Roger Olson et al. have critiqued Torrance, Barth, and Evangelical Calvinists, like myself, with reference to what they take to be our theological Achilles heel. Because they think from within an Aristotelian or Stoic theory of causation in a God-world relation, they cannot imagine how the Evangelical Calvinist, after Barth, Torrance…

Last night at work, as I’m prone to do, I was praying and thinking about—for some reason—the role that non-Christian biblical exegetes and commentators can have for the confessing Christian reading of Holy Scripture. When I was writing my Master’s thesis on I Corinthians I used a few commentators who would fit the higher critical non-confessional mold of a biblical exegete; one of these was Hans Conzelmann. He helped me work through some issues that the “evangelical commentators” weren’t. I think such critics can actually provide a fresh view of things without the oft ecclesial accretions that might attend the…

The Church is for the world, because God in Christ is for the world: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life. -John 3:16 The Gospel gives us life eternal; the Gospel is God’s life for the world, for us, in Christ; thus, genuine life, of the eternal type, of God’s triune type, comes ecstatically to us. It comes to us from the vicarious humanity of Christ as ‘He becomes us that we might [by grace] become Him, and share in the superabundance…

Often you will see me emphasizing the sin/grace matrix as a relational rather than a purely forensic reality. This bears out only if the One we have sinned against is in fact a personal rather than monadic law-like being. Sin is personal and relational because, first, God is a relation of triune persons. At root our relationship to Godself is indeed based upon the correspondence God has first (before the foundations of the world) established for us in His imago Dei (cf. Col. 1.15), in His free and gracious election to be with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus…

As is well established by now, I have struggled with reading Karl Barth because of his unrepentant lifestyle. But the reality, which is also well noted by many, is many of our most cherished Protestant and otherwise theologians from the past were also sinners; even to the point of dying in unrepentance. For me what’s really at issue is mining the past, from wherever it comes, insofar that that past can help illuminate, imaginate, and faithfully bear witness to King Jesus and the triune God. The scholastics Reformed had a way of doing what they called ‘reverential exposition.’ They would…

The Gospel, the Incarnation is a miracle not of this world. This is why abstract philosophical constructs cannot handle the weight of the Gospel, they end up distorting it. The Gospel comes with its own rationality, one that is funded by the miracle of the Incarnation. The rationality of this world, of the type that the ancient philosophers have developed, cannot scratch the surface of the miracle of the Gospel. The world and all of creation is contingent upon this miracle, the Gospel; the world was created for the Gospel, not the other way around. As such, in order to “discover” the…

The following is a blog post I first posted in September 18th, 2009. I posted this at another blog of mine from back in the day. I think what is really important to understand is that if the student doesn’t understand the entailments of classical Federal or Covenantal theology, they won’t grasp the weight of what we are offering as an alternative and counterweight in Evangelical Calvinism. Evangelical Calvinism isn’t actually a counter to five point Calvinism, per se; but instead, it is a counterweight to the thicker theology behind five point Calvinism as that developed in the Post Reformed…

Εἰρήνην διώκετε μετὰ πάντων, καὶ τὸν ἁγιασμόν, οὗ χωρὶς οὐδεὶς ὄψεται τὸν κύριον, Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord . . . Hebrews 12:14   ὄψεται (lexeme: ὁράω), translated in the NKJV above as ‘will see’ is in the future tense third person middle indicative. I have a theological-exegetical theory: P1. Divine holiness and peace are required in order to have vision and knowledge of God. P2. Knowledge and vision of God are eschatological realities available now and for eternity to come. P3. Only Jesus Christ for us has divine holiness and peace to…

I was planning on writing a blog post on what death is; what Incarnation Anyway entails; and life everlasting. But for lack of energy, and time at the moment, I am going to simply post three separate Facebook/Twitter posts I just posted; as you’ll see they are thematically related. It was really prompted by a video I just watched made by Lonnie Frisbie’s best friend. If you don’t know, Frisbee was the catalyst that started the ‘Jesus People’ movement with Pastor Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa back in the late 60s early 70s. As an aside: I attended Calvary Chapel…