When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in […]
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 […]
Martin Luther’s doctrine of grace was of a personalist sort, contra the Thomist Catholic concept of grace as a ‘created grace’ or habitus (a disposition given by God to elect humanity in their “accidents” whereby they might habituate [cooperate] with God by way of gratia infusa [infused grace, which is created and thus derivative grace] […]
Helmut Thielicke offers an important anthropological distinction, one that stems early on from someone as astute as Irenaeus, and then becomes appropriated and modified by someone as seismic, in the Latin church, as Thomas Aquinas. If this is not understood as a basic theological-anthropological datum vis-à-vis some form of classical theism, engaging with the theological past […]
The Old Testament makes no sense without Jesus as its centraldogma. It was really only after the advent and development of a post-Enlightenment deconfessionalized naturalist biblical studies movement wherein my thesis statement would make no sense. For the Christian, the idea that the Old Testament has any meaning other than its witness to Jesus, and its fulfillment therein, […]
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the lawof the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. —Psalm 1.1-2 I once read a biblical exegete, H. A. Ironside, ironically, identify ‘the man’ in Psalm 1 to be none other […]
Helmut Thielicke offers an excellent argument for thinking the imago Dei from the ad extra of human interrelations. He extrapolates from this, from the biblical witness, that if this is so, then speculative thinking about Godself ought to likewise be abandoned. In other words, as Thielicke intones, if this is how the biblical witness depicts […]
I like Helmut Thielicke for a variety of reasons. But as read his Theological Ethics what he is making more than clear to me is how I am Reformed and not Lutheran. I used to think I could be persuaded to hold Luther’s Law/Gospel (LG) hermeneutic; in other words, I was somewhat open to it. […]
Protestants of a certain stripe are all about retrieving classical theologies, particularly of a Thomistic[1] hue. These Protestants typically, and rightly, as the case may be, start by retrieving theology proper (doctrine of God) categories, and then work their way from there. They terminate in soteriology; and in the Protestant frame I’m thinking of, this […]
“He delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son he loves, . . .” –Colossians 1.13 (NET) ὃς ἐρρύσατο ἡμᾶς ἐκ τῆς ἐξουσίας τοῦ σκότους καὶ μετέστησεν εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ υἱοῦ τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ, –Colossians 1.13 (GNT) Simul justus et peccator–Martin Luther As Christians in Christ […]
Athanasian Reformed 