The Calvinist International
The work of Gospel-centered racial reconciliation presents unique challenges for Christians as they seek both truth and charity. The truth is that Reformed Evangelicalism has a disastrous history regarding the treatment—cultural, ecclesiological, and social—of African Americans. For Reformed Evangelicals, especially those who live in and understandably celebrate cultural distinctives of the American South, this is […]
In his short book Christ Our Penal Substitute, Robert L. Dabney gives a historical list of all of the confessional documents which have affirmed the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement. Here is the 10th chapter in full: The consensus of the Christian churches in their doctrinal standards does not amount to true inspiration; and we […]
We have noted before the surprising fact that R L Dabney seems to have been some sort of hypothetical universalist, and so this section of his treatment of the Westminster Confession and the nature and extent of the Atonement is quite interesting: Again, the Confession assets with most positive precision the penal substitution of Christ, […]
In his pamphlet The Westminster Confession and Creeds, R L Dabney explains the role of confessions in defining the church. He upholds the right of particular branches or denominations to limit their clergy to the boundaries of chosen confessions, but he then denies that this in any way defines the boundaries of the catholic church. Instead, […]
Speaking of Dabney and the atonement, David Ponter and Michael Lynch have dug up a fascinating historical debate. In debating the plan of Union between New School and Old School Presbyterians in the Southern Presbyterian Church, the two Southern Presbyterian champions R. L. Dabney and Benjamin Morgan Palmer engaged in outright hostility concerning the nature […]
R. L. Dabney has a sophisticated doctrine of the atonement. In fielding objections from Socinians and modern skeptics, he makes a number of important distinctions. Here he explains why the atonement is not quantifiable: The Reformed divines are also accustomed to make a distinction between penal and moral satisfaction, on the one hand, and pecuniary […]
Part of what made me want to publish a review of an older book like Allan Carlson’s Third Ways is that it seems as if a number of conservatives are making known their desires to break with the unhelpful Left/Right political bifurcation. A few years back James Matthew Wilson wrote his “Letter from a Traditional Conservative” at Front […]