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 […]
In his famous “Third Theological Oration,” Gregory of Nazianzus gives this rule for interpreting biblical passages about Christ: To give you the explanation in one sentence. What is lofty you are to apply to the Godhead, and to that Nature in Him which is superior to sufferings and incorporeal; but all that is lowly to […]
So I do want to point out the virtual impossibility of talking about these things without “sounding like” we might be drifting toward a problem. If the Son is the one who made the actual decision, where did the unified divine will (that which makes decisions) go? If Jesus made this as a voluntary decision, does this […]
Pastor Tim Keller has posted a follow-up to the ideas and concepts that Mark Jones highlighted a few days ago concerning Christ’s cry of abandon from the cross. There’s a lot that could be said, but so far it’s simply worth nothing that it is a very good conversation that opens up lots of avenues for […]
Dr. Hutchinson’s recent post on Augustine reminded me about a point of Calvin’s eschatology that I wanted to explore. Agreeing with Augustine, Calvin argues that there will come a time when Christ’s mediation will come to an end, and the godman will deliver the kingdom over to the Trinity (considered properly; its deity as such). […]
A friend notes that John Henry Newman says this in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: Calvinism, again, in various distinct countries, has become Socinianism, and Calvin himself seems to have denied our Lord’s Eternal Sonship and ridiculed the Nicene Creed. My initial impulse upon reading this is to quote a proverb of A.E. Housman: “Terence, this is […]
The Reformed have frequently been accused of having a “Nestorian” Christology in theological polemics. This is macro-level theology-trolling, of course, but it does happen. How was Nestorius’ alleged heresy diagnosed? The usual answer is that he would not call Mary Theotokos, customarily rendered in English as “Mother of God.” In Vindiciae Evangelicae, his response to John Biddle’s […]
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 […]
A couple of months ago there was a lot of discussion as to whether the Son, or Word, as such stands in a relation of obedience to the Father. The suggestion was also floated a couple of times that there was a wealth of patristic support for such an idea. The following passage from Gregory […]
I’ve noted before that the so called extra calvinisticum is really the extra patristicum, that is, that it’s an idea found already in the Christology of the Fathers. One place we see this is in Athanasius, On the Incarnation 17: For [the Word] was not, as might be imagined, circumscribed in the body, nor, while present in the […]