Revealed Ethics

At the heart of Christian ethics is the conviction that our firm basis for knowing the true, the good, and the right is divine revelation. Christianity is not a life system that operates on the basis of speculative reason or pragmatic expediency. We assert boldly that God has revealed to us who He is, who we are, and how we are expected to relate to Him. He has revealed for us that which is pleasing to Him and commanded by Him. Revelation provides a supernatural aid in understanding the good. This point is so basic and so obvious that it has often been overlooked and obscured as we search for answers to particular questions.

The departure from divine revelation has brought our culture to chaos in the area of ethics. We have lost our basis of knowledge, our epistemological foundation, for discovering the good. This is not to suggest that God has given us a codebook that is so detailed in its precepts that all ethical decisions are easy. That would be a vast oversimplification of the truth. God has not given us specific instructions for each and every possible ethical issue we face, but neither are we left to grope in the dark and to make our decisions on the basis of mere opinion. This is an important comfort to the Christian because it assures us that in dealing with ethical questions, we are never working in a vacuum. The ethical decisions that we make touch the lives of people, and mold and shape human personality and character. It is precisely at this point that we need the assistance of God’s superior wisdom.  Keep Reading >>>

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Revealed or Concealed?

In my last post, I tried to lay a foundation for an understanding of some ground-level issues relating to hermeneutics, or principles of interpretation of Scripture. Like I mentioned there, studying hermeneutics is rather tricky, because it seems circular to attempt to interpret Scripture in order to glean biblical principles of interpretation. You know, chicken or egg?

I suggested that the way out of this conundrum was to consider the nature of Scripture itself, particularly as defined in the opening verses of the book of Hebrews. From those verses we learned that God spoke, and thus Scripture is fundamentally communication. And based on that, the interpreter’s default orientation to the text is to understand it in its plain, normal sense, just like he does with other communication.

John MacArthur summarizes the point well:  Read it HERE

The What and Why of Hyper-Calvinism

The title is not going to set the world on fire, but it’s nevertheless a very good book: The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity 1689-1765. The book was written by Peter Toon (1939-2009) and first published in 1967; it includes a preface by the ubiquitous J.I. Packer. This is a scholarly, densely footnoted, technical little tome. But it contains simple, valuable lessons. Packer says, “The story is a cautionary tale with timely lessons for those who seek a revival of Reformed Christianity to-day” (8).

I see three lessons, given in increasing order of importance.

1. Toon shows, as Ken Stewart has more recently, that the Reformed faith is not completely uniform. This isn’t to say there’s not a basic continuity from Calvin to Beza to the Puritans to Old Princeton to the present day. But at many points in Reformed history it’s not been neat or clear what the Reformed position is. Keep Reading...