In Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/1 we get into his doctrine of creation. As I was reading along, as is typical when reading Barth, I was struck with something he noted in regard to creation’s beginning; with reference to creation’s telos. Here he presents what sounds something like an argument from contingence, in regard to God’s […]
God is angry about sin, just to be clear. He judged sin, because there was actually a legal penalty associated with sin. But that isn’t the crux of what was judged. The crux was the ground, the source of sin; it has ontological depth. The human heart loves the darkness rather than the Light. It […]
God is my Father.[1] Jesus said to Mary post-resurrection, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” God is our Father. Athanasius writes: “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and […]
I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify […]
So much of the soteriological discussion these days is focused on individual salvation; that is as that takes shape in the combine between the elect and reprobate within substance causal theories of God and His relation to the world through the decretrum absolutum. While ‘individual salvation’ is a central, if not centraldogma of the soteriological reality, its reach is rather […]
26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do […]
Just yesterday I was having a discussion with my wife and sister on Divine aseity. In the midst of that discussion my sister perceptively asked: ‘why did God create us to begin with?’ This is a good and basic question that most Christians gloss right past in the haste of their daily lives; but we shouldn’t! […]
Pelagian Creation is a neologism I just thought of as I was reflecting on the piece we will be reading along with from Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I have written, over the last few months, on the locus of Pelagianism with reference to a particularly popular soteriological movement online. But I don’t want to get swamped down by that focus […]
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” –Genesis 1:1 Thomas Torrance makes much of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as he should! The very freedom of God is at play in this doctrine, such that God remains free from the contingencies of this world, just as He is its Creator; but only […]
In the context of a discussion on creatio ex nihilo, Athanasius makes the following point about the power of God’s Word to sustain the whole created order from falling into utter dissolution. He writes: “seeing that all created nature, as far as its own inner principles were concerned, to be fleeting and subject to dissolution, […]
Athanasian Reformed 