Calvin the Nicene

Yet we teach from the Scriptures that God is one in essence, and hence that the essence both of the Son and of the Spirit is unbegotten, but inasmuch as the Father is first in order, and from himself begot his wisdom, as has just been said, he rightly deemed the beginning and fountainhead of [...]

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The De Leitful ERH

Hip, cool, and informative!  Read Leithart’s First Things post on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

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Everything is Everything

I’ve started to warm up to the doctrine of divine simplicity more and more because of the unity that I see in redemption. Richard Gaffin has used the illustration of facets on a diamond. Justification and sanctification are not two different and disconnected processes, but rather two different aspects of the same thing, [...]

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Matter in Motion

At first Athanasius’ view of human nature as either always moving towards God or falling away from Him into non-existence struck me as odd, but the more I think about it, this does seem to be the logical consequence of creation ex nihilio.
If we really did come from nothing, then it makes sense that we [...]

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Assuming Society

The church cannot conceive of itself as an institution within a larger society, as a pillar of society, culture, and civic order, or as a spiritual association that commands an allegiance simply in addition to the allegiance its members owe the powers of the wider world.  The church is no less (as Origen knew) than [...]

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Analogies and Analytics

Indeed, the very idea of an “analytic” philosophy is a hopeless one: in attempting to reduce every “synthetic” proposition to one or more analytic truths, self-evidently and even tautologously correct, one makes the mistake of imagining that truth for finite beings is ever anything but synthetic: just as being is granted to beings by an [...]

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Let Me Be Quick To Clarify

When I from time to time bring up the fact that Luther, Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers regularly and routinely anathematized those who would not allow little children to be baptized, I do not mean to imply that I would use their language, nor that their approach can work in the same way today.
What I [...]

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The Golden Rule and the Gospel

Philemon 17 If then you count me as a partner, receive him as me.
God forgives us our debts as we forgive our debtors. He deals with you the way you deal with others. So deal with others the way you’d like to be dealt with.

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D B Hart on Essence/Energies

Gregory himself appears to reject any “realism” regarding the divine energies (CE 1:87), but Palamas is able to draw on language of Gregory’s, and I am not at all convinced that Palamas ever intended to suggest a real distinction between God’s essence and energies; nor am I even confident that the energies should be seen [...]

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A Thought On Infinity

Discussions I’ve had concerning the doctrine of divine infinity and its implication upon the creature’s knowledge (eg. Clark/Van Til) have revealed that many feel that infinity only applies to the “quantitative” realm and not to the “qualitative” realm. God and man must have univocal and not simply analogical knowledge in order for true [...]

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