The Calvinist International
Earlier this week, Pastor Tim Keller restarted a minor controversy when he tweeted, “If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of the Father out of His infinite love for you, it will infinitely melt your hardness.” Traditional Christian orthodoxy has maintained that Jesus never lost the love of the Father, and Keller’s rhetoric also […]
A few days ago, Pastor Tim Keller posted the following devotional line to facebook: Now, we can assume that this was meant as a sort of “pastoral” exhortation, something intended to encourage and inspire rather than to serve as truly provocative or revisionist theology. It is also possible that someone other than Pastor Keller wrote […]
Limbo is a thing; but it is a fond thing, vainly invented. In the Reformed tradition, on the other hand, there is a strong strand that affirms the salvation of all those who die in infancy. In this and future posts, we will look at some representative examples. Why does speculation on limbo exist? Limbo, […]
From time to time, the Protestant Reformers, especially the Calvinists, found it necessary to clearly distinguish the ways in which the two natures of Christ operate in His work of redemption, even explaining which aspects of the work were properly carried out by Christ’s divine nature, which were carried out by His human, and which […]
The classic formulation of the sufficiency/efficiency distinction in discussions of the atonement is found in the third book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, in the third chapter of the twentieth distinctio. We will probably read this chapter as a whole in the Davenant Latin Institute’s “Advanced Early Modern Latin Reading” course. For the time being, here is the […]
So Gregory of Nazianzus, with his customary eloquence, in the fourth Theological Oration: on the cross, “Christ was in His own Person representing us.” Take, in the next place, the subjection by which you subject the Son to the Father. What, you say, is He not now subject, or must He, if He is God, […]
Editor’s note: The following is taken from Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology Vol. 1 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888) p365-388. Some formatting changes have been made for the online format and general ease of reading. The discussion is ordered by the species of justice, of which Shedd lists four: rectoral justice, distributive justice (which is then subdivided into remunerative […]
In his short book Christ Our Penal Substitute, Robert L. Dabney gives a historical list of all of the confessional documents which have affirmed the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement. Here is the 10th chapter in full: The consensus of the Christian churches in their doctrinal standards does not amount to true inspiration; and we […]
The recent publication of From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective (edited by David and Jonathan Gibson) has once again stoked the fires of an inter-evangelical dispute between “Calvinists” and “Arminians” over the extent of the atonement. Last month, Reformation 21 hosted a twofold review of the book by […]
We have noted before the surprising fact that R L Dabney seems to have been some sort of hypothetical universalist, and so this section of his treatment of the Westminster Confession and the nature and extent of the Atonement is quite interesting: Again, the Confession assets with most positive precision the penal substitution of Christ, […]