Tag: Calvinist
An Evangelical Calvinist Doctrine of Assurance of Salvation
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…
The Classically Calvinist God: A Dissonance Between its Philosophical Buttress and its Lived and Preached Piety
As I have been wont to say many times in the past: ‘who we think God is determines everything else following.’ In North America, and in my closest experience, John MacArthur, Paul Washer and their respective acolytes, illustrate this quite readily. John MacArthur and Paul Washer, both self-styled 5 Point Calvinists, maintain that God is a singular monad, an actus purus, a pure being who has been appropriated by the Christian God of revelation, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The result of thinking and speaking God this way, for MacArthur, Washer, and all else, no matter what interpretive tradition…
Jesus as Demi-Urge in the classical Calvinist Schemata
What is it about the decretum absolutum (absolute decree i.e., predestination in determinist mode) that sinks the classical Calvinist understanding of a doctrine of God in a God-world relation? It’s that it operates from an instrumentalist understanding of the Son’s relationship to the Father; it ruptures the eternal bond between the Father to the Son by the Spirit as the Son incarnates and becomes human. Under such conditions the work of Jesus is no longer essential to the being of the Son (and thus the Father), as such He simply becomes so much a demi-urge carrying out the dictates of…