Category: Evangelical Calvinist

My PhD saga continues. I am no longer a PhD student, at least for now. For a variety of life circumstances (none bad) it isn’t going to work out at the moment. Circumstances change, and life has its ebb and flows. When things do finally ebb the right direction, hopefully, the PhD will finally materialize; somehow, someway, somewhere. I am forever honored by Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology and Concordia Academic Theology Consortium for awarding me with the honorary doctorate of theology (ThD). That was a highly meaningful gesture, and acknowledgement of the work I have been able…

The theology of the cross reveals that God isn’t a philosophical Monad, or some pure being up yonder. The theology of the cross reveals that God in Christ is humble enough to define His being by concretely becoming flesh and blood humanity, such that we might share with Him who He has always already freely chosen to be: God not without us, but with us (Immanuel), in and by the assumed and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. And yet, His being, even in His humiliation as a human, becomes the image within which we are created and recreated, just as…

Martin Luther, as I have referred to previously, was indeed anti-Aristotelian, particularly with reference to Aristotle’s anthropology as that effused throughout his Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, Luther makes his disgust toward Aristotle’s Ethics, and thus, anthropology, very clear in his theological protestations, as he nailed those, just a month prior to his 95 theses, to the Wittenberg door. This was the real reason for Luther’s reformation, as my former professor and mentor, Dr Ron Frost, has so clearly argued. Luther saw Pelagian wickedness in Aristotle’s anthropology, and of course insofar as Aquinas appropriated Aristotle’s Ethics, among other things, this compelled Luther…

What is it about the decretum absolutum (absolute decree i.e., predestination in determinist mode) that sinks the classical Calvinist understanding of a doctrine of God in a God-world relation? It’s that it operates from an instrumentalist understanding of the Son’s relationship to the Father; it ruptures the eternal bond between the Father to the Son by the Spirit as the Son incarnates and becomes human. Under such conditions the work of Jesus is no longer essential to the being of the Son (and thus the Father), as such He simply becomes so much a demi-urge carrying out the dictates of…

One thing that gave me the final push to pursue the PhD where I am is seeing where the PhD in theology leads, even from prestigious schools. I cannot justify going into exorbitant amount of debt (which I already have from undergrad and seminary) to earn a degree even from a prestigious school with so-called “funding” (and most UK schools don’t even have that) that will not finally result in landing a career that 1) fits naturally with the focus of the degree (like being a full time prof), and 2) doesn’t provide a job that will pay enough to…

I have decided to go ahead and pursue the PhD in theology (Reformed Dogmatics) with Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology. It has taken me time to process, research, pray, and reflect how I should go about this. In the end this PhD is what the Lord has set before me. Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology is the Divinity School (we could say) of the General Lutheran Church (denomination) based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The denomination itself has existed since 2014, and claims to be the offshoot of the descendants from the former Evangelical Lutheran General…

You go online in the Reformed space, and you get the same old trope on a doctrine of election and reprobation; you essentially get the L (imited Atonement) of the TULIP served up as the ‘hard teaching’ Gospel truth reality about the way God relates to part of humanity in a God-world relation. I am here to set the record straight once and for all! This is simply not how God has related to the world, and this based on the analogy of the incarnation. We aren’t groping around in the darkness for snipes, but as Christians, instead, we have…

Is there salvation for the orangeman and his followers, the American heretics? According to David Bentely Hart there is not, he writes: For instance, if impoverished and terrified refugees arrive by the thousands at our southern borders, bearing their children with them, driven from their homes in El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras by monstrous violence and hopeless poverty, much of it the long-unfolding consequence of our own barbaric policies in Central America, and our foul, degenerate, vicious, contemptible, worthless, brutishly stupid sociopath and dropsical orange goblin of a president and the little horde of oleaginous fascists who slithered out…

We are suffering the ravages of a society turned in on itself; the “Enlightened,” turn-to-the-subject. This turn knows no boundary between the sacred and secular, it is pervasive among both the elect and reprobate, as it were. Biblically, this turn is the natural condition of humanity, the sin nature is woven deeply into the very fabric of our beings as humans in this fallen world. Thus, the organic way to live life is to do so by what Luther identified as the homo incurvatus in se (humanity incurved upon itself). We are oriented by what Augustine identified as concupiscence, or…

Pure nature, I’ve referred to it before at the blog. In my view it represents all forms of ill-formed theological efforts in the history of theological efforts. There are attempts in something like the ‘mediating’ theology of the Novuelle Theologiae of someone like Henri de Lubac, wherein the hard edges of a Tridentine (and scholastic Reformed) development of pure nature are softened, but I believe the whole apparatus must be abandoned in favor of a genuinely Christ conditioned, and thus, Grace actualized notion of a God-world relation. But you might still be wondering what a natura pura (pure nature) entails….