Category: Evangelical Calvinist

A word from American theologian par excellence, Jonathan Edwards, on the beauty of the triune God: It is unreasonable to think otherwise, than that the first foundation of a true love of God, is that whereby He is in Himself lovely, or worthy to be loved, or the supreme loveliness of His nature. This is certainly what makes Him chiefly amiable. What chiefly makes a man, or any creature lovely, is his excellency; and so what chiefly renders God lovely, and must undoubtedly be the chief ground of true love, is His excellency. God’s nature, or the Divinity, is infinitely…

Years ago, and for years and years I would publish a blog post every single day. Over the years, if you have been following me for any length of time, you will have noticed that that pace has slowed. In fact, as of late you will have probably noticed that my publishing output here has slowed down quite a bit; i.e., I think I’m averaging just about a post in a half every seven days. I just wanted to acknowledge that. I’m not the young whippersnapper I once was when I first started the blogging game. But let it also…

Not only is Jesus Very God, but he is also Very Man. This is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan-Chalcedonian settlement in regard to the hypostatic union of Jesus person’ being both fully God, at His very being, and fully human as the ground of His being the Man from Nazareth in the Galilee. This post is meant to dovetail with the other side of this union where we looked at the way that Barth treated the personhood of Jesus Christ as ‘Very God.’ But without Very God, the Son of God, becoming Very man, we would of all people be most to be…

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…