Category: Evangelical Calvinist

Matthias Grebe offers a good word on the potential problem of being hyper-confessional/conciliar (my phraseology), to the point that said confessions and conciliar determinations come to reduce and coopt the possibility for thinking with greater depth and criticality in regard to the implications of Scripture’s attestation to its depth reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God. So Grebe: The varied understandings of key texts can obstruct consensus in theology. And yet, theology is best done in conversation. When this dialogue does not take place, the stronghold of various doctrines and opinions (often safeguarded by a small minority who thereby…

Either something is, or it isn’t. Surely, there are nuances on a continuum, and we should all be aware of that as we approach any system or maybe better, organism of thought. Nonetheless, in the end, either a framework of thought is sound and corresponds to reality or it doesn’t. This seems like a good working definition of critical realism. If we apply this to a theological prolegomenon, what, in the end, will obtain, is that we will use various criteria to determine whether or not some belief structure, that we may or may not adhere to, is actually true…

When in the realm of Barth studies, you will often hear of ‘Barth’s actualism.’ But what in fact is actualism in Barth’s theology? And might it, once understood, offer the way out of the classical modes of thought in regard to God’s relation to the world through the decretum absolutum (‘absolute decree’)? In other words, could Barth’s actualism allow us to understand God’s ways vis-à-vis the world in such a way that God is no longer understood to be a static monad, but instead, a relational and personalist God, who indeed is constituted by his perichoretic co-inhering relations as Father,…

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…