The Calvinist International
Around the year 1548, Peter Martyr Vermigli published the following quote from John Chrysostom, said to be from a letter to Caesarius the monk: For as [in the eucharist] before the bread is consecrated, we call it bread, but when the grace of God by the Spirit has consecrated it, it is no longer called […]
After preaching an excellent sermon on a difficult text (Genesis 1:1-2), John Chrysostom encourages his congregation to keep the sermon going, so to speak, in the home: Perhaps our first reaction is to submit our minds immediately to a whole range of intricate questions. So it’s better to conclude our sermon at this point, exhorting […]
The late John Stott encouraged fellow believers to read the book of Acts in tandem with the book of Revelation. Just as the Apostle John wrote two volumes from a heavenly perspective, Stott says, so Luke wrote two volumes from the perspective of a physician, that is, from an earthly perspective. So, Acts and Revelation are […]
In the prolegomena (as it were) to the Summa, Aquinas distinguishes between the kinds of authority proper to (1) divine revelation as present in Scripture, (2) reason, and (3) tradition (that is, the kinds of authority proper to (2) the philosophers and (3) the doctores ecclesiae): But sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to […]
It may be news to many of you that Origen, the church father, and Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist philosopher, at one time or another, both sat under the teaching of Ammonius Saccas, who was perhaps the founding teacher of Neoplatonism. Joseph Trigg, in his book on Origen, briefly explains the similarities and differences between Origen […]
Origen, in his Commentary on Romans, poses an interesting solution to the question of what keeps the free will from falling away once it has been restored to God by grace: Now precisely what it is that would restrain the freedom of will in the future ages to keep it from falling again into sin, […]
Origen was not a universalist, at least not in the popular sense of a “universalist” as one who believes that all religious paths lead to the same summit, nor in the specific doctrinal position that the goodness of God demands the ultimate restoration of all things and the salvation of all creatures without exception. On the […]
Despite his penchant for allegory and Platonic speculation Origen quite often produces insightful conclusions based on the literal meaning of the text in his biblical commentaries. Historians argue that it was partly his reading of Origen’s Commentary on Romans that inspired Erasmus’s Bible-centered philosophia Christi. It was perhaps Origen’s conclusion that the “priests” of the New […]
Commenting on Romans 6:23 (“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”), John Chrysostom notes in his twelfth homily on Romans the gap in the parallelism between the two clauses. Life is not deserved as death is deserved. Death is, indeed, deserved, but […]
Our friend and McGill student Eric Parker has an excellent post on the positive use of Psuedo-Dionysius by the Reformer Martin Bucer. Mr. Parker states: Bucer, following Ficino’s commentary, used Dionysius’s writings for the sake of the Reformation. The clearest example of this is in his Commentary on Romans where he discovers in Dionysius what […]