Category: Evangelical Calvinist

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…

“Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations. 19 He will not quarrel or cry out; no one will hear his voice in the streets. 20 A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he has brought justice through to victory. 21     In his name the nations will put their hope.” –Mathew 12.18-21 If, ten years ago, you had told me that I would live to see literate evangelicals, some with…

What if Christ had never come? A rather counterfactual thought experiment, given the fact that He did. And yet Pierre Maury runs with this line for a moment in a Christmas sermon he gave in 1952 in his home country of France. Thinking of our odd habit of making a distinction between the things we may have with Jesus Christ and in him, and the things we think we can think we can have without him, it occurred to me to imagine a world without Christmas, a world into which Jesus Christ had never and would never come, where we…

Pierre Maury was Karl Barth’s ‘French connection’ and friend. Without Maury’s thinking and writing on a reformulated Reformed doctrine of predestination, Barth’s turn, and own treatment of predestination (as exemplified in his Church Dogmatics II/2) may never have happened; at least not in the shape that it did. Here is Maury on a critique of the classical Augustinian inspired doctrine of election/reprobation (especially as that developed within what came to be called Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively): Before we proceed further, there is an important point which must be made clear. If what we…

I think a lot of people involved in theological academics are driven by a competitiveness equal to professional athletes. There is this desire to over-excel in such a way that they out produce, or equally produce, by way of quantity and quality, with reference to their academic publishing (and other accolades). A constant need to prove to themselves, and others, that they are at the top of the game, and have achieved where most others have failed (or not even aspired to). The irony of this type of drivenness is that it is antithetical to a theology of the cross….

God is love. Unfortunately, for some, this entails an inherent Marcionism. Simplistically, this entails the notion that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God we encounter in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. Often people cannot imagine how the “God of war and wrath” in the Old Testament could ever correspond with the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant. But I would simply say that without the God of the Old Testament the God of the New Testament makes absolutely no sense. Jesus came as the Prophet, Priest, King (triplex…

Faith as understood in a biblical frame, as Calvin, for example, understood so well, isn’t an abstract secular imaginary, but instead it is a living knowledge of God grounded in the faith of Christ for us. For the secularist faith is as subjective as the center of their own in-turned navel; a wishful thing that they can only hope might be the case. This is not the Christian ground for thinking faith. Faith isn’t a magic wand waved in order to bring nothing into something of our own fantastical imaginations. Faith is what the vicarious Man, Jesus Christ, has for…

Is God really knowable, secularly, in the vestiges of the created order? In other words, does God repose in the fallen order to the point that vain and profane people can come to have some type of vestigial knowledge of the living God? According to Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics of similar ilk, the answer is a resounding: yes. Here is Thomas himself: as we have shown [q. 32, a. 1], the Trinity of persons cannot be demonstratively proven. But it is still congruous to place it in the light of some things which are more manifest to us. And…

I have been made an Assistant Professor of Theology at Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology. I want to thank, in particular, Dr. Enrique Ramos and Dr. Fred Macharia for thinking of me this way, and giving me this opportunity to minister to and serve the church of Jesus Christ in this way. I am honored. And if you are looking for a place to study theology and the Bible in deep and ministerial ways, then do consider applying to MLSBT. The MLSBT website I am linking to is new and under construction (as far as the academics page)….

I’ll be on a blog sabbatical for the next week and a half or so. I’ll see you when I get back. Blessings in the risen Christ and the triune God. Athanasian Reformed