Category: Evangelical Calvinist

From the conclusion of my personal chapter from my second edited book (with Myk Habets), “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith” Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the “Faith of Christ”. CONCLUSION What we have come to see is that assurance of salvation, dogmatically understood, is fully grounded in Jesus Christ. From Calvin, to Barth, to Torrance, union with Christ and the vicarious humanity of Christ provides the foundation for how to understand assurance of salvation and how it should be framed; that the faith of Christ for us is the only real saving faith, as such elect people can…

Karl Barth develops what he calls, The Three Forms of the Doctrine of Reconciliation, in Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58. The first form is with reference to the ground of Christ’s person; i.e., the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Logos, the Son of God. As many of the early church fathers understood without the ground of Jesus’ person being the triune God in the eternal Logos, there could be no salvation for the weary wayfarers of a fallen humanity. Justification before and with God required that the “bridge” between the Holy God and the fallen humanity be God Himself;…

There is no abstract conceptual apparatus by which we can know the Christian God. Knowledge of God is absolutely contingent on God’s free Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This is the only way as Christians that we know God; as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He has descended to us in the real garb of a flesh and blood human; as a Jew from Nazareth. And His reception in Mary’s womb was made fertile by the millennia of preparation for His first coming as the Holy Spirit hovered over the Hebrews. None of the above requires augmentation by way…

It is not easy to find a sound, healthy Bible teaching evangelical church in the 21st century. For example, we (my wife and I) have been without a stable church for quite some time. We have “church-shopped,” and that gets almost defeatist after a while. It isn’t that we’re looking for the “perfect church,” not at all. We are simply looking for a church where the Word of God is opened and exposited in a way where Christ is central; where the Gospel is central; where genuine Christian proclamation is taking place. Unfortunately, the MANY churches we have visited over…

I have left some context out of the following, but based on what you have read from me thus far (on the blog in general and over the years etc.), how would you translate my rather technical phraseology? Maybe you don’t think it makes sense. If so, where does it fail in regard to its theological premises and mutually implicating ideas? (I wrote this as a quick off the top thought on X and Facebook) What folks don’t realize it seems, even at higher levels, is that when considering the decretal system and God, when it comes to the incarnation,…

. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1] This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the…

I find Thomas Torrance’s stratified knowledge of God and St. Augustine’s exercitatio mentis (spiritual exercises), and their relative correspondence to be quite intriguing, and yet in this intrigue there is also recognition of a fundamental difference. Here is how Ben Myers describes Torrance’s ‘stratified knowledge’ (if you want to read Torrance on this see his Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons): Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it…

Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through Christian ontology. The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπακοη της πιτεως) conflict…

Karl Barth operated with his own reformulated Christologically conditioned Covenantal theology. For Him there is one covenant (of grace), just as sure as there are two covenants, if not three (covenant of works, covenant of grace, pactum salutis i.e., covenant of redemption) that the Federal or classically covenantal theologians such as Cocceius, Ursinus, Olevianus, Bullinger et al. articulated. Barth was a strident critic of Federal or classical Covenantal theology, insofar that he detected a primacy of the Law as the antecedent ground upon which the conditions of the covenant of grace are ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ for…

I am not a doctor of theology. I’ve tried to rationalize owning the one I had from the unaccredited school called Martin Luther School of Bible and Theology. I presented them with a 50K to 60K diss (based on my previously published chapters in my two coedited books, and some further original writing), but I just cannot justify it. I’ve been involved in the academic theology world for years, with just my MA degree (and I’m not even a fan of the academic theology world). I don’t need the ThD or PhD for what I do, ultimately. Anyway, just to…