The Calvinist International
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s characters, like Fyodor Dostoevsky himself (surprise!), often betray a hostility to Protestantism, and to Western Christendom in general. One can see this in The Brothers Karamazov. For instance, in “The Grand Inquisitor” Ivan refers to “a terrible new heresy” that “appeared in the north of Germany,” that is, Lutheranism. In “So Be It! […]
The Lutheran Wisconsin Synod theologian J.P. Koehler (see a brief sketch here) was a critic of Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy and an opponent of U.S. involvement in World War I. Nevertheless, he did not believe that this opposition somehow absolved him or Christians in general from guilt for the war, which he believed to […]
I previously posted on “legal justice” and “evangelical justice” (or “righteousness according to the Law” and “righteousness according to the Gospel”) in the Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen’s Enchiridion Theologicum. That post focused mainly on iusticia legalis. Here, I include as passage on the secundus ordo testimoniorum de iustificatione et bonis operibus, namely the “evangelical” ordo. For Hemmingsen, there are seven such testimonia. […]
Can the idea of “passive resistance” as the only permissible response to tyranny be taken as essential to”Lutheran” political thought? This may be a popular assumption, but Ralph Keen, in his 1990 University of Chicago dissertation, The Moral World of Philip Melanchthon, argues that Melanchthon’s later political and ethical thinking will not fit under this rubric. […]
Today is an important day in the history of the Church. Ok, I suppose that’s not entirely accurate; but it’s important to me, so I’m going to post about it anyway. July 29 is the anniversary of the day on which the Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen, at the time Denmark’s most famous intellectual and academic and held […]
Hemmingsen continues on in his Enchiridion theologicum on the senses in which freedom is, and is not, left to man after the Fall. He has so far affirmed freedom in the first three degrees of action. Before he moves on to the fourth degree, he says this: “There are, moreover, two types of actions that pertain […]
The next installment from Niels Hemminsen on the “degrees of action” in his “Theological Handbook” (Enchiridion theologicum). In the previous post, we saw that Hemmingsen holds that free choice remains after the Fall in the first three degrees: actions held in common with beasts, actions of reasons, and “ecclesiastical works.” In today’s excerpt he gives […]
In the section on free choice (liberum arbitrium) of his “Theological Handbook” (Enchiridion theologicum), Niels Hemmingsen divides actions into four types, or “degrees” (gradus). It is a helpful analysis of the different types of action that are possible for human beings. The first “degree” are actions we share with beasts: Let the first degree of […]
In the “Demonstration of the First Table [of the Decalogue]” in his De lege naturae (“On the Law of Nature”), Niels Hemmingsen gives the following explanation of the ordering of the first four of the Ten Commandments (the first three according to the Lutheran numbering). First, the commandments: “You shall have no other gods before1 me. 4 d“You […]
It is perhaps an easy mistake, but nevertheless a very bad one, to confuse theocracy and theonomy. It is also a mistake, on the other hand, to equate theocracy with ecclesiocracy or clerical rule. The magisterial Reformers were theocrats, believing as they did in the kingship of Christ over all earthly and heavenly orders, but […]