The Calvinist International
In an most interesting section of his Orations Against the Arians, Athanasius fields an objection against the eternal generation of the Son based on a parallel with creation. Athanasius has been arguing that certain divine names (Father, Wisdom, Word) show us that God must have always had a second hypostasis who was nevertheless consubstantial. For God […]
I want to put forth an argument against Arminianism based upon an internal flaw within the Arminian scheme of predestination. My argument, simply stated: “The Arminian position on predestination is inescapably Calvinistic (of sorts). Because this is so, the only option is to embrace open theism or Calvinism.” In the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic […]
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 […]
Some time back, I wrote a little in exploration of the relation, or ordering, of creation to redemption from an exegetical point of view. I recently was listening to John Webster’s Kantzer lectures from 2007, “Perfection & Presence: God with Us, according to the Christian Confession” (mentioned previously here), and he very nicely gets at […]
TCI has experienced something of a slowing of pace over these past six months. While we have still had great contributions, our founding contributors have all been more or less out of pocket. Some of this has had to do with personal and professional transitions, but another component is that we have been hard at […]
Oliver O’Donovan wonders in the second chapter of The Desire of the Nations about the directionality of the analogy or metaphor of the statement “Yhwh is king”: does kingship here really tell us something about God, or is it merely a metaphor, reflecting human speculation about God but not unveiling anything of political importance about His […]
I return here to a theme I’ve looked at several times before: Calvin’s views on the new heaven and new earth in relation to those that currently exist (cf. here, here, and here). One of the most catastrophic-sounding texts in this regard is Psalm 102:26, also quoted in the first chapter of the letter to […]
John Smith (1616-1652), the Christian Platonist and Anglican theologian who scholars today recognize as one of the members of the Cambridge Platonists, beautifully answers the perennial question of why an infinite and perfect God would create a finite universe. Smith affirms that the traditional answer, “for his own Glory,” requires some explanation. When God seeks […]
In Wisdom and Wonder (1905), the missing sections on science and art from the first edition of De gemeene gratie (Common Grace), Abraham Kuyper argues against an idea of a superadded gift, a donum superadditum, in man as created, this way: God created the world. Before he did so, He thought about it. He thought about it via […]
Peter is fond of saying that reality is not up for a vote. We don’t get to vote our way into determining the way things are, though the Zeitgeist is adamantly blowing in that direction. Reality is just there, whether we like it or not. Below is a particularly eloquent expression of this idea from Thomas […]