As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“I’ve heard a professor put it this way before: if you put a gun to my head and said ‘Deny the deity of Jesus or you’re dead,” by God’s grace I would hope to respond by saying ‘pull the trigger.’ If you put a gun to my head and said ‘Deny the pre-tribulational return of Jesus Christ or you’re dead’ I would say ‘Put the gun down and we’ll talk.’ Some truths really are worth dying for.”
Evolutionists, except the rather small coterie of theistic ones, believe every complex and meticulously ordered thing got here through mechanisms which we neither see now nor can see in the evidence left in the past. Even our cognitive faculties and the immaterial laws of logic and number “evolved.” The Big Bang is the most popular notion of the origin of the universe at the present time, although there is a significant lobby of dissidents. The Big Bang is an explosion. All explosions are chaotic, disorderly things. (The Big Bang exploded flat—not in all directions). In other ways it would have been like every other explosion: confused and irrational.
But from this chaos the vast complexity of the first life sprang: not, it is true, overnight, but over billions of years. From this incoherence the coherent came. Do we ever see coherence, in the form of sequenced “specified” complexity, arise out of chaos and disorder? No we do not. Nothing self-orders in complex and specific ways without a code. And a code needs someone to write it. But evolutionary naturalism requires just the opposite.
Furthermore, as we, the observers, recognize and analyze the coherence in the world, our standing (or existence) as observers must be accounted for. This was one of the questions asked by Richards and Gonzalez in their book The Privileged Planet. It is a good question. Why is the world comprehensible? Why can we do science?
We are talking about patterns, not determinations. I’ll define a pattern as something true more than 50% of the time.
By personality types, we are speaking broadly (i.e, those who value deep feeling or those who view everything as black and white/get the job done or those who value order/control or those who value relationships more highly).
“[W]e’re saying that John MacArthur is stranger to the authentic fire of the Holy Spirit and of revival”
Read the series so far.
The death of the Son of God is the only and most perfect sacrifice and satisfaction for sin, and is of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world (Second Head, Article 3).
For this was the sovereign counsel and most gracious will and purpose of God the Father that the quickening and saving efficacy of the most precious death of His Son should extend to all the elect, for bestowing upon them alone the gift of justifying faith, thereby to bring them infallibly to salvation; that is, it was the will of God that Christ by the blood of the cross, whereby He confirmed the new covenant, should effectually redeem out of every people, tribe, nation, and language, all those, and those only, who were from eternity chosen to salvation and given to Him by the Father; that He should confer upon them faith, which, together with all the other saving gifts of the Holy Spirit, He purchased for them by His death; should purge them from all sin, both original and actual, whether committed before or after believing; and having faithfully preserved them even to the end, should at last bring them, free from every spot and blemish, to the enjoyment of glory in His own presence forever (Second Head, Article 8).
That God the Father has ordained His Son to the death of the cross without a certain and definite decree to save any, so that the necessity, profitableness, and worth of what Christ merited by His death might have existed, and might remain in all its parts complete, perfect, and intact, even if the merited redemption had never in fact been applied to any person (Rejection of Errors 2:1).
I am often asked whether I am a Calvinist or an Arminian. Honestly, it is not a simple question because these are not simply-defined theological categories that can be chosen as one would choose from a menu at a restaurant. I certainly understand the importance of the question, as our answer reveals much about our understanding of God’s character and how He works with humanity. But neither label—Calvinism nor Arminianism—is adequate in explaining the biblical position. In fact, the labels aren’t even adequate in explaining the positions of the men they supposedly represent.
For example, Calvin himself had nothing to do with the formal five points of Calvinism, and in reading Calvin over the years, I am convinced he would not have been a good Calvinist. The five points were really developed through the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) in response to the teachings of followers of Jacobus Arminius. These followers were called Remonstrants, after the document published in 1610 called the Remonstrance, which challenged the Belgic Confession (1562-1566) and some of John Calvin’s and Theodore Beza’s teaching. So when we engage this question, we need to understand that we are dealing with decades (and now centuries) of intense theological controversy over theological perspectives and statements.
Is anyone familiar with John Frame’s Systematic Theology, An Introduction to Christian Belief? It’s normally $44.99, being offered through Westminster Bookstore for $1.99. I’m not a 100% Calvinist, and I realize this is likely written through that lens, but is it otherwise a good volume to have in my library?
CHAPTER I THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION
BY PROFESSOR GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, D. D., LL. D., OBERLIN COLLEGE, OBERLIN, OHIO
The word evolution is in itself innocent enough, and has a large range of legitimate use. The Bible, indeed, teaches a system of evolution.
First let me say that I am a Premillenialist and solidly so. I am also a Baptist and have no plans in advocating being Reformed or Presbyterian. Michael Horton likes to say he is Reformed with a capital “R.” Both he and R. Scott Clark bitterly castigate Baptists that they start from scratch every generation. This introduction by Dr. Duncan does no such thing, instead he praises Baptist Mark Dever very highly who does not sprinkle babies and yet is a Covenant Theology adherent. For myself, I could be Reformed but with a small “r.”
Discussion