Tag: Philosophers

. . . 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…

Charles Partee in his book Calvin and Classical Philosophy, by way of introduction, offers a nice treatment on the entailments of a mediaeval Christian Humanism versus a theological Scholasticism, as both of those were present in the early formation of the Protestant Reformation; with, of course, particular reference to John Calvin. I am going to share a long passage from Partee because it is rather pertinent to the way I see myself operating; as far as both mood and method goes. I will provide the passage, and then offer up some closing thoughts (the usual). In the sixteenth century, however,…

God is not “a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind.”[1] And yet, enter the fray of theological social media, enter the faculty lounges across many seminaries and divinity schools, or simply attempt to learn of God with more depth by reading theology books unawares (i.e., without critical resource to know otherwise), and you will end up coming up against a notion of God that has nothing do with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Whether that notion be informed by the scholasticism of Aristotelian or scholastic vintage, or it be of more…