Written by Bobby GrowJuly 25, 2022July 25, 2022

The scholastics Reformed and the Socinians in Current Disputation: Trueman, Carter, and Fesko V the Doctor, James White

The brouhaha never ceases! This time though it is internecine. I have been attempting to alert Macites (followers of John MacArthur), Reformed Baptists, even many Presbyterians, both online and via our coedited books, that their theological framework is broadly (and even pointedly) funded by an antecedent development of what Richard Muller calls Christian Aristotelianism. Whenever […]

Written by Bobby GrowJuly 20, 2022July 20, 2022

Why are so many people opposed to Calvinism Steven Lawson? “Cuz they don’t know their Bibles”

Questioner: Why are so many people against Reformed/Calvinist theology? Steven Lawson: Because they don’t know the Bible; it’s not that they know too much of the Bible, but too little that leads them to the conclusion that Calvinism isn’t viable (my paraphrase). To view the whole exchange on the above click here. The respondents also […]

Written by Bobby GrowJuly 18, 2022July 18, 2022

Human Freedom in Triumph Over Hercules’ ‘Synergistic and Monergistic’ Ways

What does it mean to be genuinely and humanly free? Must we settle for some philosophical abstraction arrived at like libertarian free agency (aka “freewill”), or on the determinist side, some form of what is often referred to as compatibilism? Do you believe that you have freewill; and if you do, how do you define […]

Written by Bobby GrowJuly 14, 2022

Christologicam Determinatam, Christologically Determined Rather than Decretively

In our Protestant Reformed circles, we often orbit around terms like unconditional election, and its causal theory of determinism, as that is funded more broadly by an Aristotelian theory of causation. For classical Calvinists this total locus can be described as, what Barth identifies in the Latin as, the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree) of double […]

Written by Bobby GrowJuly 11, 2022July 11, 2022

Why Thomas Aquinas is Not the Protestant’s Savior: On His Doctrina of Grace

Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic church, is a Doctor of Theology located in the 13th century. When this is appreciated, things go better. If we could look at him, purely historically, this would be a better way. But instead, people, in particular, Protestant theologians are attempting to retrieve Aquinas’ theology, and […]

Written by Bobby GrowJuly 1, 2022July 1, 2022

St. Bernard of Clairvaux as the Patron Saint of Luther and Calvin, Not Thomas

A friend just reminded, once again, of the role that St. Bernard of Clairvaux played in the formation of both Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s theology, respectively; the latter quoted or alluded to Clairvaux in his Institutes more than any other author. It was this spiritual, even mystical tradition that stood in the background to […]

Written by Bobby GrowJune 30, 2022June 30, 2022

On Matthew Barrett’s Thomistic Baptistism: The Christologically Concentrated Alternative

I grew up Conservative Baptist (CBA), the son of a CBA pastor and church planter. We weren’t of the Reformed variety, neither were we of the Arminian type. We were what we liked to say Biblicists. In the main, this generally could identify most Baptists, or at least it did in the past. But of […]

Written by Bobby GrowMay 18, 2022May 18, 2022

A Query with Reference to Dr Jordan Cooper and His Scholasticism

Why does Dr Jordan Cooper have the following he does? He continues to insist that Protestant orthodoxy (Lutheran or Reformed), which developed in the 16th and 17th C in Western Europe, represents the only real way to be a faithful *orthodox* Christian. As such he devotes much of his time proclaiming to the world that […]

Written by Bobby GrowApril 26, 2022April 26, 2022

Martin Luther Against Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Post Reformed orthodox

Martin Luther, as I have referred to previously, was indeed anti-Aristotelian, particularly with reference to Aristotle’s anthropology as that effused throughout his Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, Luther makes his disgust toward Aristotle’s Ethics, and thus, anthropology, very clear in his theological protestations, as he nailed those, just a month prior to his 95 theses, to the […]

Written by Bobby GrowApril 25, 2022April 25, 2022

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 […]

Athanasian Reformed

aka The Evangelical Calvinist

Category: Critiquing Classic Calvinism