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.
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: Read more…
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.[1] 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 relation to the sexes) to be at stake, at times driving the debate’s resolution in a particular direction. One meta-issue continually at the forefront in the debate over eternal subordination concerns the traditional doctrine of God’s simplicity. In classical Christian theology, it is insisted that God is not composed of parts. The simple in divine simplicity is not simple as opposed to complex, but simple as opposed to composite. It is clear that, for instance, God is not a composition of soul and body. But from the classical theist perspective, the doctrine of divine simplicity goes further than this. God is also not composed of His attributes. They do not inhere in Him as accidental properties of a fundamental “God” substance. Rather, God’s existence is simply as His attributes, which simply are Him, and which (then) are to be seen as diverse ways of naming all that is in God. What is more, since there is only one God who just is (for instance) His own will, it is problematic—from a classical perspective—to speak of the Son as “submitting” to the Father in the intra-triune life from eternity past. It is difficult to see how this would not imply a multiplicity of wills of which God’s supposed “one will” is an amalgam. Read more…
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.”
“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, there has been a cottage industry of major and minor historical and normative treatments of philosophy written by an Evangelical theologians and philosophers. Why enter the fray with yet another such volume? What could possibly justify the existence of this volume in light of so many other contributions? Read more…
James Ussher and the Reduction of Episcopacy
James Ussher
James Ussher was born to Arland and Margaret Ussher in Dublin on 4 January 1581, the fifth of their ten children. This prominent Anglo-Irish family embodied in miniature the religious divisions of late sixteenth-century Ireland. His uncle, Henry Ussher, was the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh from 1595 until his death in 1613. On the maternal side, his uncle Richard Stanihurst was an advocate on the continent for the Irish Catholic cause, and his cousin Henry Fitzsimon was a Jesuit controversialist active in the Irish mission. According to his first biographer, Nicholas Bernard, Ussher’s mother was “seduced by some of the Popish Priests to the Roman Religion” whilst Ussher was in England, and she never returned to the Protestant faith, a cause of much anguish for her son.[1] Read more…
