Category: Evangelical Calvinist

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….

I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify as a bird all you want, but the second you step off the Golden Gate Bridge physics take over.” I elaborated further on Twitter, this way: And just to be clear, physics isn’t the judge, God is the Judge. When people rebel, and physics, physiology,…

Karl Barth wrote: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.”[1] Keeping in theme with this apocalyptic motif, Samuel Adams writes the following, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer progresses from the disciple’s conformation to the crucified one to the disciple’s conformation to the risen one: To be conformed to the risen one—that means to be a new human being before God. We live in the midst of death; we are righteous in the midst of sin; we are new in the…

John Webster offers too good of a sketch on a theory of revelation for me to simply pass it by without sharing it for you (and I’ll be using it in my doctoral study as well—which my topic has changed already, I’ll share what it is in an addendum at the end of this post). He synopsizes what I have often been after in many of my posts on the same locus. Let’s read along with him, and then I’ll close with some concluding reflections (and that addendum). The broadest outline of a diagnosis would be something like this: For…

Here is Barth talking about event, and how, as Samuel Adams says: “If the event contextualizes us, rather than being contextualized by us, then we can say that it is something new, since its origin is “outside” of us and has the nature of an “event. . . .”: God’s revelation in its objective reality is the person of Jesus Christ. In establishing this we have not explained revelation, or made it obvious, or brought it into a series of the other objects our knowledge. On the contrary, in establishing this and looking back at it we have described and…

I am now a PhD student “beginning” (in scare quotes, because I’ve been studying said subject matter since 2002 in earnest) research on a doctrine of grace in what I am calling the Protestant Church Fathers juxtaposed with the grace-ologies of Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth. I am somewhat riffing on this topic of research from TFT’s own PhD dissertation entitled A Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers. I am finally undertaking this venture of study through the Concordia Academic Theology Consortium: Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology; the same institution (of the General Lutheran Church) that recently awarded me with…