Tag: Real

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…

Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and many others are attempting to renew the church through retrieving their reading of the Protestant Reformation. All they are really doing is retrieving Roman Catholic neo-Thomism, and the attending medieval categories therein, as the balm of Gilead they believe such retrieval will accomplish for the failing evangelical church. And yet this is the irony: they are simply promoting a substance metaphysics, and the decretal God therefrom, which the OG reformers were intent on dismantling in the name of Christ and revelation. TF Torrance underscores these matters for us: That is what happened at the Reformation….

As usual, in the right online environs, the Calvinist-Arminian (Provisionist) debate has carried on unabated by not actually engaging with the actual entailments of a real-life Calvinist-Arminian theology. In other words, what the reader will find, are people who are in this interminable joust, oriented by the five points of Calvinism, or not. There is a free-flow exchange between favorite prooftexts, and their ostensible exegesis, and/or an intractable debate about this or that philosophical understanding vis-à-vis God’s sovereignty and human agency in freewill. I am almost positive that everyone reading here is well aware of what I am referring to….

So what? What’s all this high falutin theologically jargony theology have to do with anything? I get to this point more times than not. Even though I often engage high theological notions, and attempt to reflect therein, at the end of it I often walk away with the “so what!” feeling. Many Christians take one look at the themes I write on, others write on, that the dead theologians have written on, and simply shake their heads figuring, at best, this is all for the eggheads among us. But I really don’t think that that is the case, or that…