Tag: Pierre

What if Christ had never come? A rather counterfactual thought experiment, given the fact that He did. And yet Pierre Maury runs with this line for a moment in a Christmas sermon he gave in 1952 in his home country of France. Thinking of our odd habit of making a distinction between the things we may have with Jesus Christ and in him, and the things we think we can think we can have without him, it occurred to me to imagine a world without Christmas, a world into which Jesus Christ had never and would never come, where we…

Pierre Maury was Karl Barth’s ‘French connection’ and friend. Without Maury’s thinking and writing on a reformulated Reformed doctrine of predestination, Barth’s turn, and own treatment of predestination (as exemplified in his Church Dogmatics II/2) may never have happened; at least not in the shape that it did. Here is Maury on a critique of the classical Augustinian inspired doctrine of election/reprobation (especially as that developed within what came to be called Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively): Before we proceed further, there is an important point which must be made clear. If what we…