The Calvinist International
“But this alone we say, There is grace administered by the promises of the gospel, enabling us to perform the obedience of it in that way and manner which God will accept.” – John Owen The Wrong Question When arguing for the necessity of good works for final salvation, not as the meritorious ground […]
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 […]
Do Amish Romance novels find their origin in the Swiss Reformation? You may never have considered this question before, but it really is only fair to ask it. Martin Luther and John Calvin are regularly blamed for the enormities of the modern world. Why let Ulrich Zwingli off the hook? Well, alright, it might be […]
This is part 2 of a two-part reply. The first part is here. In my previous post I indicated that it would be helpful to provide a model for how the Jews could know the OT canon without an infallible magisterium, and in the following I will suggest how this process occurred. Any explanation for how […]
Following up on Pastor Wedgeworth’s post regarding “Reformed Irenicism,” I thought it important to explain a few points regarding the relationship of this term to the idea of “Reformed Catholicism,” as it is often called. As it turns out, different people mean very different things by the label – though I think they (broadly speaking) could […]
From CSL’s Introduction to 16th Century English Literature: Dickens’s Mrs Clennam, trying to expiate her early sin by a long life of voluntary gloom was doing exactly what the first Protestants would have forbidden her to do. They would have thought her whole conception of expiation papistical. On the Protestant view one could not, and […]
In the first passage, Contarini had discussed two senses of the term “justice”; he now adds a third (still working from the classical tradition), the metaphorical “justice” of a mind whose powers are all in harmony with one another, where the lower parts obey the higher, and the higher is in a state of rectitude. […]
In 1541, Gasparo Contarini, a cardinal in the Church of Rome, wrote a short but fascinating treatise on justification in which he espouses a position that is neither quite the pure Protestant doctrine nor the later Tridentine doctrine. As far as I know (though I haven’t looked that hard), an English translation has never been […]
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 […]
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. […]