Throughout their book, Robbins and Gerety show a genuine inability or unwillingness to engage with the arguments I present for the objectivity of the covenant. For example, one of my common illustrations for what I am talking about is the covenant of marriage. A husband is covenantally a husband, and whether or not he is …
The Scribes and the People
Because of a successive series of synods, ecumenical councils, general assemblies, and graduating classes of the seminaries, the Christian people of the land were greatly impoverished in their souls. Because of this, a great lament arose, and the people of all the congregations were greatly discouraged and wept most copiously. A traveler from another region …
Call It Regeneration
In order to take all baptized covenant members as participants in Christ in the “strong sense,” we would have to distinguish what is objectively given in Christ, and not what is subjectively done with those objective benefits. Perseverance would, on this reading, be what was subjectively done with what God has objectively given. In this …
A Different Father
In fact, biblically speaking, “nature” is not captured by a static Hellenistic definition, but rather something that is revealed through the process of generation. The nature of the father is found in the nature of the son. In order to acquire a different nature, I must acquire a different father.
According to Nature
Our interest in such passages should not have to do with the wickedness as such, but rather has to do with the divine “paternity suit” that follows on the basis of it. If some covenant members are children of the devil and others are not (as the quotation from 1 John indicates), then there must …
Theological Spam
My spam filter catches hundreds of invitations a day — invitations to check out these mortgage rates, these crazy chicks, these unbelievable cell phone offers, and more. One nagging question concerns why these companies go to all this effort. Does anybody actually get their mortgage this way? And the answer has to be yes. Otherwise, …
Regeneration and Fatherhood
On all questions regarding regeneration, the basic question is: who’s your daddy? Outside the covenant, the devil is father. For the elect, God is our Father. But for the reprobate covenant member, God is his Father in a real covenantal sense, but in another tangible way, the devil is still his father. This is fully …
Regeneration Is . . .
Regeneration means being transformed from the seed of the serpent to the seed of the woman. This cannot simply be equated with baptism (or circumcision in the Old Testament) because most of the “broods of vipers” identified for us in the Bible were covenant members.
The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth
In Not Reformed At All, at the bottom on page 29, Robbins/Gerety breathlessly announce that I have denied the very concept of truth. They put it this way. “In 1999 Wilson published an essay titled “The Great Logic Fraud” in his book The Paideia of God. It expresses his revolt against excellence, precision, and logic. …
Reformed Just A Skosh
From time to time, I want to make a few comments on passages of the Robbins/Gerety Not Reformed At All book. The passages generally have this in common — they are marked with exclamation marks in the margins, sometimes more than one, in my personal copy of this book. I will not be yelling at …