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 […]
(This essay continues a series on the Federal Vision that I have been writing since November, 2019. The first installment can be found here. The second is here. The third is here, and the fourth is here. Though I earlier stated that this essay would be my final one, I see the need for one […]
In a puzzling string of assertions comprising part of a recent online article, the claim was made that the principle that “all truth is God’s truth” is “distinctively Dutch Reformed.” (Curiously, as a superior alternative there was offered the perspective of a theologian who was…Dutch…and Reformed.) The claim that the aforementioned principle is as Netherlandish […]
In Q/A 25 of the Geneva Catechism, commenting on the Apostles’ Creed, John Calvin strikes the note (for the children!) of the majority of the Christian tradition, given great emphasis by, e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus: God’s essence is unknowable to us and incomprehensible. We therefore know him from his works and his effects–from the ways […]
Plato, in the Phaedo, had Socrates claim that philosophy was “practice for dying and death.” It was a sentiment that was to exercise great influence down through the centuries, all the way to Heidegger’s “Being-toward-death” and beyond. (That last part works better if you say it in the voice of Buzz Lightyear.) John Calvin agreed […]
John Calvin was what you might call “a fan, bigly” of the proper use of the motif of the imitation of Christ. He mentions it in various places; but one that is particularly illuminating is found in his comments on 1 Corinthians 11.1, where Paul says, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” […]
I noted a couple of years ago Calvin’s possibly revealing use of the word summa (as in, Summa theologiae) “so prominently in the first sentence [of the final edition of the Institutes (1559)],” and commented that [t]he gesture would signal, I think, a radical simplification of the theological enterprise, reconfigured in radically non-speculative terms (he is interested only […]
For good reason, one might find John Calvin referred to as an “anti-speculative” theologian. But as with so many other monikers applied to Protestant theologians (e.g. “anti-scholastic”), one must take the label in its relative rather than its absolute signification. When confronted with biblicism, Calvin could sound a philosophical and “speculative” note. B.A. Gerrish observes […]
In this next installment of the Admonition to the Polish Brothers, Calvin treats Malachi 3.1: if Malachi spoke of Christ in saying that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (ESV), then Christ must be Yahweh–for Yahweh alone is worshiped in the Temple. Translation Add to this also the fact that, although […]
Calvin continues his discussion in his Brief Admonition to the Polish Brothers and draws the distinction between talking about the Persons of the Trinity in relation to each other and using the term “God” to refer to the divine essence as such. Translation In addition to these things, if there is anything proper to God, it is made […]