One of the perennial arguments in favor of definite atonement (that Jesus did not die except for a subset of humanity) is that if Jesus paid for the sins of all humanity, then it is logically impossible for those same people to suffer condemnation, or that it would be unjust to exact the same penalty twice. If some suffer condemnation and hell, how could it be possible for someone whose debt of sin has been…
Cardinal John Henry Newman famously said “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”[1] Newman seemed to refer to the institutional church and the rites and sacraments that came to prevail. Many apologists for high sacramentalism have offered similar arguments. What we see in history is not what “free churches” manifest. We see priests, bishops, archbishops, and the church occupying a central role in the Christian life. Along with this, the church…
John Henry Newman was a British churchman, a sometime member of the Oxford Tractarian movement. The movement was an attempt at course correction in the Anglican church at a time when it was moving left. They saw a recovery of tradition and traditionalism in worship as the way forward. Newman was one who didn’t stop there, however, but went on to join the Roman Catholic Church, and was eventually named a cardinal. Newman’s intellect and…
Christian Nationalism is getting a lot of attention at present, and Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism is held forth by some as the most persuasive argument. There is simply too much in the book to comment on everything, but I will appraise the main arguments of the book. I want to begin by listing what I think Wolfe gets right. His assessment of the current state of things in the United States is…
From time to time I have posted comments about the nature of ministry in the New Testament. Some have difficulty accepting the idea of a non-hierarchical ministry, but when we look at the Scriptures, this is what we find. I summarize this by saying that the New Testament never refers to Christian ministers as priests; this is a title reserved for all the people of God (or for the Lord Jesus alone.) The truth of…
Does the “Double Payment” Argument have merit? In a prior post, I looked at the idea of faith purchased on behalf of believers. This argument is often central to a defense of definite atonement. Seeing such a purchase seems to require a commitment to the covenant of redemption—at least, in the thinking of John Owen it does. Faith and the transfer of it to the elect is included in the death of Christ, and this…
Craig A. Carter’s 2018 book Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis was recently recommended to me. I suppose one could call this a review, but I think of it more as a “book dialogue.” I wonder if I, as an evangelical on the conservative end, am the target audience for the book, because at many points as I read, I found myself saying “of course, who would think otherwise?”…
In a recent interview about a book I wrote, the interviewer asked me for a definition of sacramentalism. This is because in the book I use this term to describe a system, usually found in the hierarchical churches, that treats grace in a particular way. That way is to affirm that grace flows to the believer through the rites and rituals defined by the Church. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, it goes…
The Bishop of Salisbury insists God is sovereign to save anyone at any time. John Davenant is part of a rich heritage of “English Hypothetical Universalism.” That is, men who believed and taught that salvation was possible to any and every sinner while they yet lived. This was in contradistinction to definite atonement, that Christ died only for a collection of sinners whom God designated for salvation by his pretemporal decree. Davenant was also a…
The diffuse nature of evangelicalism means it is both difficult to define what it now is, but also that it is popular, that is, of the people. These facts have without question led to doctrinal aberration and heterodoxy. The solution some put forth is we need to overcome biblicism and return to classical theism. But the counsel is not self-evident, in that it rests on definitions that may not be commonly held. One writer offers…