The Calvinist International
Justification at its most basic is straightforward. A man recognizes that he is a sinner. He judges himself to be guilty for his sin before God. He looks for a source whence he can obtain the righteousness he does not possess. He finds it offered to him in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He trusts […]
Let’s return again to the Westminster Confession of Faith on Scripture. In 1.9, the Divines say: IX. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and […]
I’d like to return to a point that I made in the previous post to emphasize it again, because, at the end of the day, it is extremely important. So, once more: the Westminster Divines say this: VII. All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things […]
Like father, (not quite) like son. A.A. Hodge does not go so far as his father Charles in positively affirming that all persons dying in infancy are certainly saved, though he does think that there is “good reason” to believe this–that there are, moreover, “many reasons to indulge a highly probable hope” that this is […]
I don’t consider myself a partisan of the strong Puritan construal of the regulative principle, in so far as I understand it–one that, on principle, objects to the corporate celebration of things such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Ascension, and so on. However, the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the confession most often subscribed by […]
The basic point of the passage from Cicero’s Laws cited here the other day reappears in the Westminster Confession of Faith (of all places) in the chapter on–coincidentally enough–marriage. Treating incestuous marriages, the Divines say: IV. Marriage ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity forbidden by the Word. Nor can such incestuous marriages ever be […]
This is an addendum to a recent post on God’s love in the Calvinist tradition, a tradition which supposedly has no place for it as an attribute of God, but only as a description for “how the elect experience him.” Chad Van Dixhoorn, in his recent book Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster […]
Over the last ten years, at least, there has been a rise in the prominence of confessions of faith in Reformed and Evangelical churches. They have even been pushed to the forefront of parachurch associations and even, in some cases, general marketing and promotional strategies. The odd-sounding adjective “confessional” (which is quite a different thing […]
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, […]