The Son became flesh through the work of the Spirit. Once this pattern is fixed in our minds, we can see foreshadowings of this throughout the OT: God works through His Word, but it is a “voiced” Word, a Word empowered and given authority by God’s “breath.” Creation: Jesus, according to John, is the eternal Word of the Father, by whom all things were made. But the Word that speaks the world into existence comes with the Spirit or ?breath?Eof... Read more
The Son became flesh through the work of the Spirit. Once this pattern is fixed in our minds, we can see foreshadowings of this throughout the OT: God works through His Word, but it is a “voiced” Word, a Word empowered and given authority by God’s “breath.” Creation: Jesus, according to John, is the eternal Word of the Father, by whom all things were made. But the Word that speaks the world into existence comes with the Spirit or ?breath?Eof... Read more
1 Corinthians 15:45: And so it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The Last Adam became life-giving Spirit. We are celebrating Advent, the coming of Jesus in the flesh, but we celebrate it as a people who have never known Jesus according to the flesh. Jesus is absent from us; in His personal human body, He has ascended to the right hand of His Father in heaven. And yet, He is here with us, and He... Read more
In this morning?s sermon, we will be looking at the role of the Spirit in the incarnation of Jesus, in the redemption achieved by Christ, and in the life of the Trinity. One way to summarize the point is that the Spirit is the divine bond, the ?glue?Eof the Trinity. The Spirit is the love that binds the Father and Son. The Father begets the Son through the Spirit, and that the Son returns His love to the Father in... Read more
Vander Zee shows some chutzpah in addressing the question of Eucharistic sacrifice, and in suggesting that there are senses in which the Eucharist is properly said to be sacrificial. He offers a few quotations to show the Reformation pedigree of this perspective. The first from Calvin: “The Lord’s Supper cannot be without a sacrifice of [praise], in which, while we proclaim his death [1 Cor 11:26] and give thanks, we do nothing but offer a sacrifice of praise. From this... Read more
Leonard J. Vander Zee’s Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is the most satisfying introduction to sacramental theology that I’ve come across. VanderZee works out a Reformed understanding of sacraments in general (focusing on the fact that sacraments are God’s action – hardly a Reformed monopoly, of course), as well as a host of issues on the sacraments of baptism and the Supper. VanderZee, however, does not simply repeat Reformed slogans, but brings in voices and perspectives from other traditions... Read more
Oswald Bayer says that for Luther faith is “divine work in us,” and that means for Luther that God “slays the old nature that belongs to the old world, the old Adam, and makes us new creatures, a new creation.” This is, in Bayers’ summary, the “decisive aspect of the Word [which faith responds to] that creates justifying faith. For Luther the customary alternative of ‘forensic’ or ‘effective’ is no alternative at all. The forensic is effective and the effective... Read more
White in fact does not even cover all the passages concerning justification within the texts that teach the doctrine. Romans 6:7 is absent from his Scripture index, and he lists the “key Pauline passages” that deal with justification as Romans 3-5; 8:29-34; Gal 1-5 ( The God Who Justifies , p. 82). What about Romans 8:1-4, with its language of “no condemnation”? He does mention that passage (p. 98), but explains that there is “no condemnation” because “all who are... Read more
Near the heart of the Protestant doctrine of justification (as Barth saw) is the insistence that God, not man, is Judge. Efforts at self-justification are NOT merely moralistic efforts to recommend ourselves to God (though they are that). Efforts at self-justification are also (perhaps more fundamentally) assaults on God’s Lordship; our efforts to justify ourselves and others are efforts to usurp the unique judicial role of God, namely, that He is the Judge of all the earth, and that our... Read more
James White (in The God Who Justifies )issues this important caution in his treatment of the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek word-groups for justification and righteousness: “there are obvious instances in which the biblical term speaks of a moral or ethical quality when it speaks of someone being righteous. Protestants do not by any stretch of the imagination assert that the words ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification,’ always, and in every instance, refer solely and completely to a divine act of... Read more
Leithart
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