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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the […]
Jesus is our life; He is God’s humanity all the way down. ‘He who knew no sin assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ Our sin is ever before us, but it is only now before us in the glorified face of Jesus Christ. We can never deny […]
The notion of ‘being justified’ is an inherently Christian notion, at least in the West (but I’d argue, globally). Our grammars for thinking life, the secular/sacred divide is no matter, come to all of us through a Christian lens. But even prior to that, in a chronological (and logical) sense, the desire to be ‘justified,’ […]
You go online in the Reformed space, and you get the same old trope on a doctrine of election and reprobation; you essentially get the L (imited Atonement) of the TULIP served up as the ‘hard teaching’ Gospel truth reality about the way God relates to part of humanity in a God-world relation. I am […]
Being born into sin is akin to being born into hell. The Apostle Paul writes: “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also […]
Karl Barth wrote: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.”[1] Keeping in theme with this apocalyptic motif, Samuel Adams writes the following, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer progresses from the disciple’s conformation to the crucified […]
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 […]
Athanasian Reformed 