Let us then mark, that the end of the gospel is, to render us eventually conformable to God, and, if we may so speak, to deify us. (John Calvin, Commentary on II Peter 1:4)
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Posted in Church Fathers, Doctrine of God, Evagrios Pontikos, Gregory Nazianzen, History, John Chrysostom, Origen, Theology, tagged Arianism, Nicaean Council, Origenism on March 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Dialogues concerning the persons and nature of the Godhead were the hot topics of controversy during the early centuries of the church. These discussions had sensitized Christian laymen and clergy alike to the use of God-language. The council of Nicaea (325) and the council of Constantinople (381) had both condemned Arianism, whose followers refused [...]
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I’m presently combing modern Thomist interpretations of the Eucharist in an effort to find similarities between St. Thomas and St. Calvin (as one professor here calls him). I’ve realized that Thomas’ commentary on the Gospel of John is a good place to start. See this quote, for instance:
What our Lord said about eating his flesh [...]
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Q: Does faith unite one to Christ?
A: Yes
Q: Is Christ God?
A: Yes
Well, there you have it. Now one must go on to question what sort of union believers have in Christ. I haven’t quoted Nevin in a while, and I’ve recently been looking back through his The Mystical Presence. What an excellent book. This paragraph [...]
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“A man had a fig tree in his vineyard and came seeking fruit on it and found none.” (Luke 13:6)
“He was trying to get a look at Jesus, but being a short man he could not see over the crowd. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, because Jesus was going [...]
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Posted in 20th Cent. Theologians, Anselm, Atonement, Christology, Cur Deus homo?, Gustaf Aulen, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Medieval Authors, Reformation, Soteriology, Theology, tagged aulen, Christus Victor on March 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
*The following is the conclusion to a review I did of Gustaf Aulen’s Christus Victor. Therefore it is lacking a bit in context, but still important for anyone who is privy to the issues.*
Because Jesus was God and man one cannot argue that the Atonement involved a total God-to-man movement or a total man-to-God movement; one [...]
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Posted in Anselm, Apologetics, Medieval Authors, Nature/Supernatural, Ontological Argument, Philosophy, Philosophy/Theology, Reason/Revelation, Theology, tagged faith seeking understanding, natural theology, philosophical proofs on March 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Many Reformed folks have been taught that the ontological proof for God’s existence is completely worthless for apologetics. This idea is usually backed up by the argument that Anselm was a rationalist who thought he could prove God just by thinking really hard. But, is that not a bit anachronistic? Was Anselm [...]
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Posted in 20th Cent. Theologians, Ancient Philosophers, Aristotle, Doctrine of God, Frederick Copleston, Medieval Authors, Neo-Platonism, Philosophy, Philosophy/Theology, Plato, Reason/Revelation, Thomas Aquinas, tagged transcendentals on March 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
According to the late Frederick Copleston one should not dispense of the philosophy of Plato in favor of that of Aristotle, or vice versa. He notes fundamental problems in both systems. Aristotle does not provide a transcendental ground for the constancy of essences. Plato considers universals to exist apart from essences, thus leaving man without [...]
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For Aquinas, crucially, being is analogically like knowing and knowing like being. This is what makes Aquinas’s theory of truth – unlike modern theories – an ontological rather than epistemological one. Indeed, the conformity or proportion which pertains between knowing and the known introduces an aesthetic dimension to knowledge utterly alien to most modern considerations. [...]
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Posted in Anselm, Bible, Doctrine of God, Medieval Authors, N.T. Wright, Theology, tagged election, Romans, voluntarism, will on March 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
N.T. Wright gives, I think, an important hermeneutical tool for Romans 9. He says,
if there is complete disjunction between God’s justice and everybody else’s, it would be better not to use the term at all. (Commentary on Romans, p. 639).
Having previously held to the hermeneutic “God can do whatever he wants” I no longer [...]
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