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] […]
I just listened to a podcast where both presenters are former Calvinists (one Baptist the other Presbyterian). Now one of them has converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, while the other is a ‘Christian Mystic’ (whatever that entails). One is now a Christian universalist, who sounds like he approves of a Rahnerian anonymous Christian mode and transcendental Christ-consciousness, while […]
I wrote the following just before Thanksgiving last year. I was going to write a new post in an attempt to redress these things for new readers, but I thought I would just repost this one since it covers all the bases I had intended to cover in the post I was about to write. […]
16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are […]
The riposte from Roman Catholic and Orthodox apologists, maybe even some Anglican, is that the Bible’s canonicity is given to it in a causal way by the Church’s recognition. But the historic Protestant response is that as Calvin emphasizes, it is autopistis; or in other words, it is self-authenticating. Karl Barth, often chastised for being an […]
This might seem rather pedantic, like at the level of: who cares? But, apparently I do. Others do too, but only those ensconced in the confessional of so called Protestant Reformed orthodoxy; theological identity is important in these sectors. For me it’s mostly important as a matter of fact, rather than proving an identity [for […]
Where was I? Oh yeah, about a third of the way through my friend Geordie Ziegler’s book Trinitarian Grace and Participation: An Entry into the Theology of T.F. Torrance. I’ve had Geordie’s book for probably a couple of years now, and I’m supposed to write a review for it. Well I’m continuing on, and the […]
Sola fide. Faith alone is the material principle of the Lutheran Protestant Reformation, and it is principial for the Reformed basis of knowledge of God and self. But because of classical metaphysics this principle didn’t blossom into the full flowered reality it had inherent to it in inchoate ways. In other words, because of an […]
If you don’t find yourself in agreement with mainstream evangelical reformed theology you might find yourself placed into a role that plays like the antitriniarian biblicists of 17th and 18th century Western Europeans. In other words, and this helps explain a lot for me personally, any reluctance to be a flaming post reformed orthodox thinker […]
Predestination that shibboleth of Reformed theology; it has been shibboleth to me as well. Predestination is the idea that God arbitrarily elects particular people to eternal life, and chooses that others either remain (passive) reprobate or are (active) reprobate with no actual hope for eternal life. This approach to a God-world relation relies upon a […]
Athanasian Reformed 