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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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The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate in the 21st Century West
It’s a truism at this point to note that the relationship in the western world between religious doctrine and political theory has become quite tense and uncertain. This is particularly true when we consider the past 3-5 years. As more and more nations have adopted same-sex marriage as the law of the land, this has…
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The Inklings Event We Don’t Need… and the One We Do
Last summer in Oxford England in a pub The Inklings Symposium was conceived. I was an attendee at a conference on C. S. Lewis which shall remain nameless. It was a conference I later came to learn that my friend and fellow Lewis scholar, Jason Lepojarvi, has called a prime example of “Jacksploitation.”
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The Bishops are blind. It is up to us to open their eyes.
Most of us are very familiar with the Reformers’ polemics against the episcopate of their day, but it’s just as important to be familiar with long-standing pre-Reformation critiques of it. For it is there that we can find a major illustration of why it is wrong to claim that the Protestants were the heretics, rebels,…
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Chronological Snobbery and the Christian Faith
In a recent post at Reformation21, Guy Waters argues that a “Presbytery does possess the power to instruct one of its members or licentiates not to teach a difference that the court has determined an exception.” I agree. Interestingly, I can’t imagine this being an issue in the early modern period.
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Why You Should Care About Peter Martyr Vermigli
We tend to operate with an implicit Darwinian cynicism when it comes to the history of ideas—if someone or something has been consigned to the dustbin of history, there’s probably, we suspect, a good reason for it. At the very least, we figure, theology seems to be doing just fine without the contributions of this…
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How did early Protestants think about confessional subscription?
In a recent post at Reformation21, Guy Waters argues that a “Presbytery does possess the power to instruct one of its members or licentiates not to teach a difference that the court has determined an exception.” I agree. Interestingly, I can’t imagine this being an issue in the early modern period.
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