Tag: others
Against the Magical Faith of the Pelagians and Others
In my online wanderings recently the locus of Christian faith has come up. It is oriented around the age-old debate of the origination of faith; and in fact, what faith is. Is justificatory faith before God a quality inherent to the human (so, a Pelagian frame), or is it a reality that is alien to and outside of human agency that is given as gift to humanity (whether that be given to certain ‘elected’ humans or to all of humanity)? I would argue, along with Karl Barth, that justificatory faith is an outside of us reality that comes to us…
Christ is Risen! As the Basis for Freedom Before God and Others
The following is a post I wrote quite a few years ago where I reflect on the implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is both devotional, personal, and a little academic in orientation; but I think it’s fitting for today. Christ is risen! I really struggled with a false sense of guilt and condemnation for particular sins from my past for years upon years. The enemy of my soul kept me living under ‘a yoke of bondage’ that Jesus said I ‘would be free indeed’ from. The Lord did not leave me as an orphan though, by the…
Christ’s Resurrection as the Basis for Freedom Before God and Others
The following is a post I wrote quite a few years ago where I reflect on the implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is both devotional, personal, and a little academic in orientation; but I think it’s fitting for today. Christ is risen! I really struggled with a false sense of guilt and condemnation for particular sins from my past for years upon years. The enemy of my soul kept me living under ‘a yoke of bondage’ that Jesus said I ‘would be free indeed’ from. The Lord did not leave me as an orphan though, by the…
The Depersonalization of God’s Grace by the Thomists Reformed and others
What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger…