Category: Evangelical Calvinist

All creatures, since that are from nothing, to that extent share in nothing . . . and are in need of some external power for every moment that they exist. –H. Heidegger cited by Heppe cited by Barth (CD III/3, 74) All of humanity is sustained by the Word of God’s power. He came into this world, having made the world, and yet the world knew Him not. He is closer to us than we are to ourselves. If people could begin to lean into this point, made by the Reformed theologian, Heidegger (not the other Heidegger), we would lose…

I am starting my Philosophy of Religion class tomorrow (January 13th) at the University of Oxford (by distance, of course). Thanks again to a friend of the blog for his donation, in order to pursue continuing education like this. I am critical of philosophy, often, but let me qualify that a bit further. I am only really critical of philosophy when it is used as a basis and the material for doing Christian theology. If these disciplines are kept separate and distinct, then I have no problem learning to think with the rigor of a philosopher. As long as the…

As Christians we want to think about God as Christians. Christians, definitionally, aren’t profane persons. Indeed, according to Scripture, Christians are saints; i.e., set apart in Christ who is our Set Apart in the presence of the Father for us. This might seem scandalous to even recognize, but Christians are simply in a different place in regard to knowing reality as it is; insofar as the Christ (Jesus) allows us entrée in these, our bodies of death, in this in-between time. Some might want to push back and describe my observations as idealist. But it is just the opposite, in…

Portrait des Theologen Karl Barth in Basel. Photographie 1956. Portrait of the theologian Karl Barth in Basel. Photography. 1956. I was chided back in the day by some Princeton Theological Seminary, at that point, MDiv students (who now have their PhDs from the same school), by referring to Scripture as containing biblical revelation; and this with Barth’s theology as the broader background. These guys asserted that Barth would never refer to the Bible as containing “revelation” of God. And yet clearly these lads had never really even read Barth in depth. Barth’s doctrine of the Threefold Form of the Word…

It is no secret, for those whom it is no secret, that Augustine believed that original sin was a genetic material stuff that was propagated in and among the human mass through the lust of sexual intercourse. Indeed, some of this, no doubt, was developed in the context of his Manichean background; but also, Augustine believed that the passions themselves were ultimately representative of the very base of sin, or what he identified as concupiscence (self-love). He wasn’t the only one who believed this, there were many others, following, like Ambrose, and later Peter Lombard, who affirmed the same in…

Salvation. God is salvation. Jesus is God. Jesus is salvation. Jesus is both the object and subject of salvation; both the electing God, and elected human. Jesus is with and for us and in us before we are in Him. Jesus first became human that we might become human in Him. Jesus is the Godward to human and humanward to God movement of the triune life for the world; even as He is, without the world. Jesus, in the triune life, freely chose to not be God without us, but with us. Jesus was and is, first, Deus incarnandus (the…

Merry Christmas! Incarnation and Atonement; these are of apiece as we celebrate the coming of the Son of Man as a babe in a manger. The trajectory of His freely elected life to be us that we might be Him, by grace, through union with Him, in His vicarious humanity for us, is a cruciform trajectory that first confronts us in the womb of Mary; and then in the wood of the manger. He was born that we might have life, and that more abundantly. He became God with us, Immanuel; not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit….

The *world* even the *churches* speak of love, as if all it needs is love. This is true. But only God *is* love. Only God *is* Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no other independent category of “love,” that is not first a predicate of God’s eternal life within itself. So, when the world, and even the churches, speak of love, they ironically bear witness against themselves; that is, if they claim that all we need is love, but are thinking of that in purely horizontal, human, and profane ways (which they are). The world’s only salvation is to…

Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in…

Being a human coram Deo (before or in the presence of the living God), in regard to its telos or purposefulness, is underwritten by being a worshipper of the triune God rather than an as an idolater of a self-projected god of a unitarian and individualistic origination. So-called classical liberalism, much of which was in fact Teutonic or German in orientation, of the Enlightenment/ -post higher critical ilk, is of the latter instance. That is to say, higher critics of the New Testament so demythologized the NT of its reality in the Theandric person of Jesus Christ, that all that…