Category: Evangelical Calvinist

Too often, a stress on the centrality of the incarnation is dismissed, by liberals and conservatives alike and without clear argument, as “Barthian” or “Christomonist,” thereby giving them permission to function as epistemological Arians.[1] What do Alan and Andrew Torrance mean: ‘epistemological Arians?’ They are simply noting that if there is some type of general independent free-floating ontological knowledge of God without being radically grounded in God’s own Self-revelation in the Son, the Logos of God, Jesus Christ, that in fact such knowledge would be something that is finally subordinate to God; something that was abstract and a thing that…

Things remain politically charged in the world, clearly; especially during this season of time as we lead up to the American presidential election in November. Ever since Trump, in 2016, it seems the balance of powers in the world have been disrupted, to a point that they are no longer willing to conceal their movements. These are indeed, trying and confusing times for Christians. Many simply want nothing to do with the politick, which is very understandable. Personally, I have grown weary of such things as well. And yet as Christians we are to be salt and light in the…

Let me be forthrightly clear: to follow a Christologically conditioned reading of Holy Scripture is not to be, at the same time, an implicit Marcionite. It is also not to suggest that the Old Testament history is simply the Hebrew peoples’ progressive knowledge of God, and thusly their writing thereof, as if it isn’t in fact heilsgeschichte, or the story of God’s in-breaking activity all throughout ‘salvation history,’ providentially and actively orienting and working through the events of said history in order to eventuate the actualization of his pre-destination in Jesus Christ to be for the world and not against…

“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds. –Jeremiah 17:9–10 This is going to be a very brief screed on the inscrutable reality of sin and evil. As the prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh, or as Yahweh speaks directly through Jeremiah, something is quite clear about the human fallen heart: i.e., it is beyond our comprehension. The only commentary or explicator provided for its depths comes in the incarnation of God in Jesus…

I am currently reading Megan Basham’s recently released book Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. She goes after folks who I have identified as mainstream evangelical leaders (to one degree or another), such as: Russell Moore, Ed Stetzer, JD Greear, Gavin Ortlund, and many others. I have only made it through chapter 1, on climate change. But I know the basic thesis of the book, and that there is leftist money intentionally being funneled into the evangelical environs in order to soften evangelicals to progressive themes; such as: climate change, the LGBTQI+ agenda,…

Confusing the various subcultures of Christianity, with the Gospel itself is fleeting. Each Christian tradition has its own idiosyncratic ways of liturgizing, and various parochialisms, and its just straight up weird stuff that they do. For my respective “tribe,” broadly speaking, as an American evangelical, what has become weird is driven by its slavish commitment to consumerism at all costs. Whether it be professional worship bands leading worship (like the folks who didn’t quite make the American Idol cut), the pastor wearing skinny jeans, sporting a mustache, with a man bun, or just the self-help sermons and programs that run…

Christians don’t believe in a chain of being between God and the world. Christians believe that God in-breaks into the world with irruption that this world could never produce. Without God’s gracious and free election to invade this world, this humanity, we would have no access into God’s inner life; which is eternal life. The Christian believes in a life that was first set for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, a life, a Deus incarnandus (‘God to be incarnate’), that was there ever before this world was this world. Deus incarnatus (‘God incarnate’) is humanity’s only…

God is not an analogue to analyze. God instead is a triune and eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God (de Deo uno) in three persons (de Deo trino) to be inhabited, through Christ, and enjoyed. The Christian is in an immediate relationship with the triune God through union with Jesus Christ. We are indeed, as Christians, in an intimate and personal relationship with the living God. Not because we are persons in relationship with God—thus predicating what God’s relationality and personalist reality must be—but because God is eternally personal and [onto]relational within the inner-reality (in se)…

I’m starting to believe as I continue my trek through the 6M words of Barth’s CD that many young (and some old) so-called Barth scholars have never read through Barth’s CD. There are things in there about history, the resurrection, so on and so forth that completely emaciate any claim that Barth did not believe in a bodily, historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. How Barth thought of history, through Christ, ends up being different than the historicist vision. Even so, for Barth it is bodily, historical, history delimiting and primordial event. The way Barth takes Bultmann to task directly, in…

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is what all of history is contingent upon. All that we experience, linearly, has a ground behind, underneath, and after it that is in fact the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without that centraldogma there is no history; there is no nothing. I think we, especially as Christians of all people, really need to get our heads around this reality. When we do we start living as those who have the hope of Christ in us, the purifying hope. We have a critical valence to look at the world from that is not purely conditioned by…