Category: Evangelical Calvinist

Calvinism continues to be of issue, particularly at the popular Church level. I haven’t posted as much on this issue over the last few years, it seems. It hasn’t been intentional. My blogging is typically shaped by my reading, and since much of my reading time has been consumed by Barth’s Church Dogmatics my blogging has reflected that (and of course the various other readings I am doing concurrent with that). It isn’t that I don’t find these matters of import, or interesting, it is just that in certain respects I have so exhausted myself on the various themes that…

Earlier this morning I listened to Credo Magazine’s podcast in which Matthew Barrett interviews Louis Markos, the author of From Plato to Christ, among other books. You can listen to that podcast here. They were discussing, of course, the role and impact that Plato had, and continues to have on the development of Christian theology. Barrett often likes to refer to the Great Tradition of the Church, which of course is really more of a Latin way to think about things theological and ecclesial (the Greeks have the Consensus Patrum, ha!) I of course repudiate the general prolegomenon, or theological…

A reader of the blog just contacted me via email to inquire about what I would recommend as introductory reading on and from Barth. The following is the list I put down off the top. 1) Michael Allen’s: Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader 2) George Hunsinger: How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology 3) The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth 4) David Guretzki: An Explorer’s Guide to Karl Barth 5) Bruce McCormack: Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth 6) Christiane Tietz: Karl Barth: A Life of Conflict   7) Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 8) Karl…

Questioner: Why are so many people against Reformed/Calvinist theology? Steven Lawson: Because they don’t know the Bible; it’s not that they know too much of the Bible, but too little that leads them to the conclusion that Calvinism isn’t viable (my paraphrase). To view the whole exchange on the above click here. The respondents also include the late R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur. None of this is surprising, of course Lawson et al. will claim that people reject their version of Calvinism because, as he claims, people don’t know their Bibles. It is hard to fathom how folks can survive…

What does it mean to be genuinely and humanly free? Must we settle for some philosophical abstraction arrived at like libertarian free agency (aka “freewill”), or on the determinist side, some form of what is often referred to as compatibilism? Do you believe that you have freewill; and if you do, how do you define freewill (as a Christian) before God? While this might seem a knotty discussion, nonetheless, it is significant and impinges on everyone’s daily life. According to my reading of the Apostle Paul to be humanly free is to be for God. Since only God, ultimately, has…

Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic church, is a Doctor of Theology located in the 13th century. When this is appreciated, things go better. If we could look at him, purely historically, this would be a better way. But instead, people, in particular, Protestant theologians are attempting to retrieve Aquinas’ theology, and the broader Thomist mantle in general, for what they see as a necessary corrective for the evangelical turn into heterodox and heretical positions in regard to doctrine and its subsequent praxis as it is applied to the daily lives of its adherents. But is Aquinas…

The Christian world needs a revival! It needs to come to a genuine knowledge of God. Not a speculative knowledge, as those retrievers of Aquinas would have it; but a concrete known knowledge of God gifted to us in God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. When God becomes a predicate of a notional ‘godness’ that ‘we’ (think the philosophers) connive, God simply becomes a projection of our own faces (Ludwig Feuerbach knew this well). But this is the God that the evangelical Reformed types these days are introducing people to. Not the God of the Bible revealed in Jesus Christ, but…

Jesus is our life; He is God’s humanity all the way down. ‘He who knew no sin assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ Our sin is ever before us, but it is only now before us in the glorified face of Jesus Christ. We can never deny that we were, and continue to be (in this in-between) sinners, insofar that the humanity of God bears witness of this reality to us all our live long days. But it is this grace of God that has shown up for us in these last…

A friend just reminded, once again, of the role that St. Bernard of Clairvaux played in the formation of both Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s theology, respectively; the latter quoted or alluded to Clairvaux in his Institutes more than any other author. It was this spiritual, even mystical tradition that stood in the background to the foremost of these magisterial Protestant Reformers; it wasn’t Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. I am bringing this up within the ambit of my last post with reference to the retrieval work being done by people like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, for the Baptists. When…

Karl Barth is often said to be a proponent of Christian universalism. The logic is that Barth’s doctrine of election, whether he likes it or not, commits him to affirming some form of a Christian universalism (i.e., the notion that all people of all time will eventually freely submit to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord; even if that finally only happens in hell itself). But Barth adamantly rejected this supposed necessity of his theological trajectory. As Douglas Campbell writes: Barth has often been accused of universalism, but he steadfastly denied it (see the final paragraph of CD III/2),…