No this is not a post about Hitchens, Dawkins, and others - although it could be, given that not much has changed by way of argumentation, and much has been lost of the more refined and philosophically sensitive arguments of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche in favor of mass-marketing “antitheism” or “anticlericalism” to the illiterati. The only thing really new is that it is “old” atheism mobilized with a budget, a PAC, an ad campaign, a persecutorial agenda, and a publisher … but I digress …

I was reading through a section from Voetius’  5 volume work Selectarum Disputationum , (more…)

Over the past week or so I have had the privilege of reading through Beza’s annotations on Romans (a 1566 Stephanus edition of the Bible with Beze’s annotations & a 1642 Cambridge edition of the Bible). I ran across some of his comments on Romans 5:17 and thought I would translate them and pass them along. (more…)

If the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology comes anywhere near you, you need to go. For details, see here. I am not able to make it to the first address so I will be heading to the meetings tomorrow and the seminars tomorrow afternoon. There are some good historical theologians involved and I am looking forward to it.

In quite a bit of modern discussion (for example, the early 20th century piece - Aulen’s thought provoking Christus Victor - a terrible “historical survey” with a theological agenda!) it is common to segregate strands of atonement thought and maintain that the viewpoints are incompatible. Aulen’s contribution to the discussion is that he is the first in the modern period to raise the Christus Victor issue, and is therefore a great foil to get into the material from the patristic period onward. In Aulen’s work, we find that a Christus Victor theory is pitted against penal substitution and also the moral example theory. I could have addressed his version of the East/West tensions, 19th/20th century conservative/liberal issues, but I think since there is a more basic way to treat the work historiographically, his problematic expression of these other points are subsidiary to his main thesis. Basically, Aulen wants to maintain that there is an incompatibility between atonement theories - so a penal substitution cannot coexist simultaneously with Christ as victor over sin, death, and the devil, or as an example of love as well. Is he right? (more…)