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What Nature Teaches: Recapping the First Twin Cities Regional Convivium
On Friday, October 5, nearly 200 people in the Twin Cities area showed up at Cities Church in St. Paul, MN to hear plenary sessions from Joe Rigney and Brad Littlejohn.
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Justice Discourse in the Internet Age, Pt. I: Introduction
Writing almost two decades ago, René Girard—who devoted most of his life to exploring the issues of social contagion, scapegoating, victims, and the cults that surround them—warned against the rise of what he termed a ‘victimology’ movement.
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Debating the Simple God
In the last few years, few issues have been more controversial among Reformed evangelicals than the debate over the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father. To the extent that God’s intra-triune life has been thought to be the foundation and model of inter-human relationships, many have perceived their various social programs (particularly in…
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Vermigli and the Descent Clause
If you are like me and many other Christians throughout ecclesiastical history, you, no doubt, have questioned the meaning of the famous (or infamous) descent clause in the Apostles’ Creed: “He [that is, Jesus Christ] descended into hell.”
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“What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem?”
Within a month, The Davenant Institute will release an anthology volume entitled Philosophy and the Christian: The Quest for Wisdom in the Light of Christ. Compared to most of our publications, this particular one might seem rather redundant in our day. Hasn’t enough, maybe even too much, already been said? In the last few decades,…
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James Ussher and the Reduction of Episcopacy
One of Ussher’s major contributions to seventeenth-century debates about church government was The Reduction of Episcopacy which was probably composed in early 1641, but not appearing in print until after his death in 1656. This was an attempt to implement his vision of primitive episcopacy in the Church of England and was proposed as a…
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Purified by a Principle? Augustine’s Conversion of Neo-Platonism
In City of God 10.24, as part of his analysis of and argument with Platonism and Neoplatonism, Augustine takes up the question of mediation–who mediates, and how–questions of some moment in previous and contemporary Platonist demonology, which made use of several levels of divine or semi-divine intermediaries in order to bridge the gap between the…
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Distinguishing Before Denouncing: A Review of “Why Liberalism Failed”
Liberalism has failed. Or so confidently declares Patrick Deneen in his obviously named Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen offers one of the more useful and concise attacks on the often vaporously defined liberalism that has, according to Deneen, plagued modern societies for the last several hundred years. Deneen’s proof of liberalism’s failure is not that it…
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“Plainly Diabolical”: Bishop Davenant Weighs in on Clerical Celibacy
John Davenant, as Lady Margaret Professor of Theology at Cambridge, gave a lecture in the 1610’s defending the thesis that: “Thus, marrying in the Sacerdotal Order is lawful, and the decree for its prohibition in the Church of Rome is unlawful, anti-Christian, and plainly diabolical.” In this post, I want to highlight some of the…
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Remembering the Importance of Divine Justice–An Update from Dr. Tim Baylor
In conjunction with my research on the work of John Owen, the last several months have had me working on a treatise on divine justice authored by Jesuit luminary Francisco Suarez. This work is a very rich and nuanced treatment of a dogmatic topic central to many of the most controversial theological discussions of the…
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