Theology Theology Archives
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The Will Of God and the Theory of Complex Phenomena
In Christian theology there is a recurring tension between “Because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you” (Hosea 4:6) and “Avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless” (Titus 3:15). On the one hand, we are exhorted not only to know God, but to know about God [...] -
Atheism and Reward Morality
“If you’re doing what you’re doing for reward and punishment, it’s not really morality.” I’ve seen this trope more than once in Atheist circles, that traditional religious morality is somehow less moral for being reward-oriented. Atheists, it is contended, are more moral for doing the right thing – not for reward’s sake, but just because it’s right . . . -
John Stuart Mill on Calvinism
One of the great marring flaws of Mill’s treatise is the persistent confusion of society with government. Though he does distinguish them explicitly at certain points, far more often “society” exercises the force of law over an individual. This error, his aside on Calvinism suggests, stems from a muddy idea of authority… -
Hell and Atonement; Punishment and Consequence
Albert Mohler, in his essay Why They Hate It So, argues that the view of Hell as a consequence of sin rather than the punishment for sin undermines the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. I have of course argued that Hell is a consequence, but I am certainly no enemy of substitutionary atonement. The fundamental truth which consequentialist and punishmental partisans miss is that, when speaking of sovereign divine action, punishment and consequence are indistinguishable categories. . . . -
Rob Bell is Almost a Calvinist
Rob Bell should be a Calvinist. And I don’t mean that in the way that anyone should. I mean he’s just one step from already being there. In the midst of all the hubbub surrounding Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins, the guy writing for The Tenth Leper actually got a pre-release and read it, [...] -
Luther on the Two Wills of God
It has become a standard argument from those who believe in the absolute sovereignty of God to speak of two wills of God – the revealed, normative word, and the inscrutable, positive, decree. Luther draws the distinction between God preached, and God not preached – that is, between the Word and the Substance of God. . . . -
A TULIP for Marriage
Having written about marriage as a strictly spiritual ordinance – one on which civil arrangements have exactly zero bearing – I’m going to develop that point a bit further by applying to it several key doctrines of the Protestant Reformation. First, the five points of Calvinism, known by the acrostic TULIP. For context, it will [...] -
Heresy
The fact that good Christians disagree on various doctrinal issues is a reality that every Christian must eventually come to grips with. There are, of course, easy ways out. For example, no one is going to heaven except those with my particular beliefs. This idea usually crops up in only the most insular churches and [...] -
Marriage As Sacrament: Did Protestants Call It Wrong?
The strength of the Protestant reformation was the axe it applied to contemporary Catholic doctrine. One of the many categories to get the axe was the sacraments. Catholics had a nice round list of seven, several of which are nowhere spoken of in the Bible. But one in particular got thrown out perhaps too hastily, one whose consequences are now coming to bear in the modern American political scene: marriage… -
God, Authority, and Authoritarianism
Ni Dieu Ni Maître – “Neither God Nor Master” – has become a trendy slogan among anarchists. The idea is that the self is the final authority, that it has an obligation to submit itself to no authority, religious or political. There indeed seems to be a sentiment that religious devotion is incompatible with liberty. Submission to the state, the logic goes, is only a small step to a mind accustomed to submission to God. Is it such a small step, though, as if the authority of God were essentially the same as the authority of men but on a grander scale?… -
Occam’s Razor and God
Occam’s razor is often cited as an evidence against the existence of God. The argument goes that if we can explain the universe without resorting to notions of God, then it is preferable to do so. Whether or not Occam’s razor actually applies in this situation, this argument obviously has its appeal: why argue for the existence of something that we don’t need to explain what we see? Yet the appeal of this argument in itself belies its very unsuitability for this question, and in fact demonstrates just the opposite point… -
The Will of God for My Life: The Importance of the Doctrine of Sovereignty
With graduation fast approaching, the question gets asked very often: What is God’s will for my life? Life is full of uncertainty about the future, and that’s generally the context of the question. What college do I go to? What job do I take? Whom do I marry? Where do I move? The circumstances are endless, but the question remains the same. -
Why the Lapsarian Debate is Irrelevant
First, this is not a disputation as to whether decrees can precede one another. Even lacking a temporal order, a logical order may be necessary. The relevant question is in terms of means versus ends: were humans created for the sake of salvation and reprobation, or were salvation and reprobation created for the sake of humans?… -
Proximity and Likeness: In What Sense is God the Good for All Men?
C.S. Lewis in the above passage from The Four Loves draws a contrast between proximity to God and likeness to God. And when we say that nearness to God is the Good for all men, it is important to keep in mind in which sense we mean that. -
Trinity and Tritheism: On Coequality
“Coexistent, coequal, coeternal.” These are the three adjectives typically used to describe the persons of the trinity. The Athanasian creed has given Christianity a fear complex when describing the trinity: it is the creed that deals most explicitly with the idea of the trinity, but also the only ecumenical creed with explicit anathemas. Thus, the trinity, like few other concepts in Christianity, is considered “untouchable” – a sacred cow of the Church… -
The Balance
The balance concept of works is one of the most bedeviling concepts in pop religion. The idea goes, if I do more good things than bad things, God will accept me. Unfortunately, even Christians all too often buy into the balance model. Not so crude a balance model as exists in pop religion – we take James 2:10 to mean that even one act of sin outweighs all the good works in the world. This is passably true on the surface, but it is still fundamentally a balance model…
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Godliness vs. Godlikeness: Pride, Sanctification, and Nature
The goal of this article is to apply the ideas behind What Is Free Will? to the theme of A Humble or a Haughty Spirit. Having read both of these will be helpful in reading this article, as I justify in those articles some of the assumptions that I will take for granted in this [...] -
Objection Answered
For a time the question of culpability in predestination was one which I had a sense of the right answer, but had a hard time articulating in coherent categories. The Romans 9 argument, “God is God. He can do whatever He wants”, is true, as far as it goes – but also profoundly unsatisfying. Why [...] -
The Law as Values
People from the time the law was given have looked at it as a series of categorical imperatives – things that one must abide by no matter what and regardless of the reason. It becomes more about the action itself than the spirit behind it. It was exactly this thinking that led Jesus to rebuke the Pharisees for adhering to the letter of the law while completely missing its spirit (Mark 2:23-28)… -
A Teleology of Rest
Though the expenditure of energy prevents it, physical teleology tends towards a state of rest (diffusion, the second law of thermodynamics). Though the addition of new information prevents it, economic teleology is always tending towards a final state of rest (equilibrium) with regard to prices (Mises, Human Action, Chapter 14.5). Though borrowing, language contact, and [...] -
The Ends of Faith
Throughout the history of the Church, there have been countless movements that either rise and quickly wither, or completely reform the Church. Names like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards stand out as giants of the faith, while there are countless others whose ideas perhaps conform better to the modern zeitgeist, but whose names are obscured by the passage of time. What makes the reformers stand out against time, while other movements repeatedly die even after being repeatedly introduced? . . . -
In What Sense does God Act?
What is human action? According to Mises, it is the use of means to attain ends. One acts towards these ends in order to gain utility, or to somehow improve one’s lot, however that looks for the particular person. This unfortunately runs into problems with the idea of the almighty, as Mises also points out [...] -
Is God the Author of Sin?
Let it first be understood that this is a completely different, but not unrelated question from “Does God sin?”. To answer either question, we first need to define our terms. Sin is the valuation or desire for something less than good. To sin against another person is to have something less than their best interest in mind. Thus, if God is that highest good, sin in its most general form is to value anything more highly than God. This is what Jesus meant when He described Himself as the fulfillment of the law (Matthew 5:17): the law is an approximation, love is the form. The law is 3.14, love is ?. The law is a riemann sum, love is an integral. The law is a series of commands that approximate how the regenerate person acts, where love is what actually produces it in fullest form…
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The Necessity of Depravity
Idly scouring the internet as I sometimes do, I came across an article entitled 50 NES Quotes You Should Know. Though the article succeeded in broadening my library of references to old school video games beyond “Do a barrel roll” and “Abort/Retry/Fail?”, the main revelation came from an offhand comment beneath the fourth page of the article:
Christianity says that people are inherently good and that deep down we all want to do the right thing. Video games prove the opposite is true.
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Thankfulness
With Thanksgiving around the corner, I think it would be a good idea to take a look at thankfulness. What should we be thankful for? Are there things we should not be thankful for? I’ve insinuated before that material prosperity is not necessarily a blessing. Should we nevertheless be thankful for it?
Note that the first and last beatitudes are for those without any claim to prosperity. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:2), and “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). These are blessings which preclude the rich (one would assume that the persecuted generally forfeit their wealth). Obviously there is a special blessing for the poor, but is that a complement to a blessing of wealth, or is wealth not a blessing at all?…
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The Nature of Christ
The description of the Trinity in the Athanasian Creed was frustrating for me for a long time. What does it mean to say that there is one God with three Persons? It’s all well and good to say “eternally begotten”, but it’s almost a senseless phrase. In fact, the whole creed is full of concepts that make very little sense on their own: without explanation, it’s a very unhelpful way to think about the Trinity.
Fortunately, there is explanation…
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Divine Delegation and Free Will
Creation is such that God is the ultimate good for it. Good is thus absolute with respect to creation as we know it. But is it absolute with respect to God? That is, could God create something such that God Himself is not its ultimate good?…
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The Pre-Existent Will of God
I’ve referenced John Piper’s proof of a selfish God a lot in the past few articles, and once again it is the starting point of this one. This is posited as the motive of God working through history in the redemption of mankind, that His mercy and justice may simultaneously be exemplified.
But does this mean that God is bound by higher notions of ‘glory’ and ‘good’? It would certainly seem so if we are to apply the self-interest model of free will to God. We are bound in our behavior by our knowledge, our values, and our interests. Obviously God has infinite knowledge and thus entirely correct values, but does God have interests? Being omnipotent, can He ever improve His lot?…
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Blessing
As Christians, we have faith that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). As straightforward as this seems, the concept of good itself is more problematic than it ought to be: what is good in the first place, and what does Paul mean by good here?
I cannot count how many times I’ve heard prayers thanking God for placing us in a country where we are free to worship Him. It’s a favorite theme of Patriotic Evangelicalism…
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Beauty
The phrase “The beauty of the Lord” is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, especially in song. It’s a wonderful thing to sing about, but what is the beauty of the Lord? How can it be appreciated when there is nothing of Him for us to see but His creation?
For a long time I had no idea what it meant to marvel at the beauty of the Lord. I had not even but the vaguest idea of what beauty really meant. In retrospect, my first glimpse was the testimony of a missionary who had been working with Campus Crusade at various universities. He recounted the story of a grad student he met one day, who told him though she was not a Christian, she knew “there must be a God, because…
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Standing in Solomon’s Shoes
The Dream of Solomon, by Luca Giordano The concepts behind the recent article What Is Free Will? may seem pretty out there – they are very abstract at points, and it’s easy to question the value of plumbing to such depths. But the framework also has intensely practical benefits for the believer who is open [...] -
What Is Free Will? (Or, Does the Nominal Believer Really Believe?)
The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. -Wikipedia, Free Will Rational agents, by definition, act based on what they know and believe in order to maximize their expected total enjoyment(/pleasure/utility/etc.). Though intuitively it would seem that not everyone is rational, the definitions [...] -
From Whence Religious Truth?
With Postmodernism in full swing, it almost seems as if new religions are springing up faster than new followers can be made. Especially hot on the market is custom religion – tailored from an eclectic mix to fit your own needs and desires; something deep enough to make you look sophisticated (“spiritual but not religious”), [...] -
A Humble or a Haughty Spirit?
I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of [...]