Nathan D Shannon

This study presents a theological account of moral experience and of the nature and possibility of evil in conversation with Herman Bavinck, Johan Herman Bavinck, Geerhardus Vos, and Cornelius Van Til. In light of their work, the fall is examined as the prototypical instance of religious intercourse with God, one in which religious symmetry and ontological asymmetry appear in concentrated juxtaposition. The first sin, expressive of original moral mutability, unfolds against a backdrop of the absolute God non-necessarily self-expressed as moral norm for the creature. The neo-Calvinist position is that this is a covenant condescension of God establishing the moral mutability of Adam’s original state and that it is thus the primary theological account of history and human moral self-understanding. Furthermore, the covenant condescension of God is understood, by Bavinck and Van Til in particular, as the original incarnation of God. The uniqueness of the incarnation proper, beginning with conception in the womb of Mary, is therefore not primarily metaphysical but redemptive-historical. When the Son appears in the fullness of time, he expresses an incarnational relation which predates the fall but which is now amplified by his mediatorial humiliation for the accomplishment and vindication of both the long-suffering and the special grace of God. The primary claim of this book is that, according to major voices in neo-Calvinism, the triune God has self-revealed as absolute person and that the condescension of the absolute, personal God primarily in the Son is the necessary and sufficient condition for creaturely moral experience, for moral meaning in the realm of human self-understanding.

This study explores Nicholas Wolterstorff’s theory of “situated rationality” from a theological point of view, and argues that it is in fact a doxastic ethic based upon the theology of Wolterstorff’s neo-Calvinist, Kuyperian background, which emerges in terms of his biblical ethic and eschatology of shalom.

I begin with Wolterstorff’s deontological (obligation-based) notion of the ethics of belief, which focuses on his notion of “belief entitlement.” Against the individualism and abstractionism of standard (modern) accounts of justification and epistemic merit, Wolterstorff argues that there are in fact no doxastic obligations isolated from the full scope of a person’s socio-moral accountability. In other words, the ethics of belief are inextricable from situated ethics in general. What I am obligated to believe or not to believe depends entirely on my moral situation: the social responsibilities and personal relationships in which I find myself. The moral value permeating our distinct but overlapping situations flows ultimately from the teleology of the world as intended by its creator for flourishing and from the inherent value of humans as bearers of the divine image. Human creatures are created by God for flourishing in their relationships with each other, with nature, and with God. So, every individual finds himself within a unique socio-ethical situation, and each individual situation particularizes this creational ethic of shalom. As a result, the ethico-religious life strikes a balance between the universal ethic of shalom and a person’s particular circumstances. In terms of the ethics of belief, “practices of inquiry” are doxastic actions which are present to a person situationally, bearing situationally constituted shalom moral value.

Situated rationality, the sum of Wolterstorff’s decades-long work on epistemology and rationality, is a shalom doxastic ethic, a Christian, common grace ethic of doxastic (even religious doxastic) pluralism.

This article presents comparative textual analyses toward a basic grammar for understanding the interface between Reformed and Confucian sociologies of knowledge. I first propose a three-part Reformed theology of theological tradition in terms of historically successive communities. I then present relevant material from the Analects of Confucius, focusing on Confucius’s own sociology of learning and instruction. Striking similarities between these two models come to light, as well as significant differences in the areas of unity and truth, ontology and office, and sin and grace.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/genealogy-and-doctrine-reformed-and-confucian-sociologies-of-knowledge/

This paper examines the relationship between apologetics and preaching in three sermons by the apostles Peter and Paul, and find s that, for the apostles, apologetics and preaching are not separate d isciplines but inseparable and inter-d epend ent components of gospel ministry and the life of the church. Taking apostolic preaching as parad igmatic for ministry and Christian life tod ay, this paper argues for a retrieval of this organic understanding, on the one hand, of apologetics that aims toward and follows the structure of gospel proclamation, and, on the other, of preaching which features vindication of the whole of counsel of God against unbelief in its various forms.

This article presents Herman Bavinck and Johan Herman Bavinck's explications of the uniqueness of Christian theism in terms of the absolute personalism of the Christian Scriptures. Both argue that, outside of Christian special revelation, absoluteness and personality appear in irresolvable dialectic. The dogmatician Herman Bavinck detects this tension in the history of Western philosophy, and the missiologist Johan Herman in the religions of Java. They argue that the Christian Scriptures present the absolute personality of the triune God as the subversive fulfillment of the contradictory theisms of philosophical speculation and of non-Christian religions respectively. This article thus attempts a retrieval of a promising neo-Calvinist theme for the sake of a Reformed theology of religions and missiological encounter.

This article seeks to recover a familiar but unappreciated female voice from English Puritanism of the 17 th century, that of Margaret Baxter. Various challenges to such recovery are examined, most notably the nature of her relationship to her pastor and husband Richard. Extant literature from Margaret!s hand focuses on the events surrounding her conversion and life-threatening illness shortly thereafter. The present analysis of these texts and their circumstances concludes that Margaret was a faithful but critical heir of the practical theology of her day, and that in her lived expression of that tradition one observes the enduring scars of the trauma of her conversion.

This article compares the views of Franciscus Junius and Cornelius Van Til regarding pre-and post-fall natural knowledge of God. It is argued that while differences are clear, Junius and Van Til both claimed that pre-fall natural theology was not intended to function independently of special revelation. Junius and Van Til also agree that post-fall natural theology, unaided by special revelation, is not theology in any meaningful sense. The conclusion, borrowed from Willem Van Asselt, is that for both Junius and Van Til the determining factor with regard to the structure and status of natural theology is the God-human relationship.

This essay examines Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures (1908), published as Philosophy of Revelation, for indications of a noteworthy conception of the relation between ontology and revelation. One discovers in the lectures that in responding constructively to various challenges to the Christian faith, Bavinck pushes in a direction documented in recent studies of his work: toward doctrinal organicism. What emerges in terms of ontology and revelation is Bavinck's belief that Christianity is distinguished primarily by confession of a real divine relational initiative, understood in terms of the incarnation, which serves as the ontological precondition of divine revelation and thus as vindication of creaturely naming of God.

The classical view of the Creator-creature relation conveys ontological asymmetry by affirming a real creature-Creator relation and a rational Creator-creature relation. But the hermeneutical implications of this view obscure the Creator-creature symmetry of biblical religion. In this article I propose a real covenant relation as a divine initiative establishing a relation within which Creator-creature intercourse is possible, actual, and real. I defend the notion of real covenant relation through a study of John 5, and I develop it theologically with reference to Reformed biblical and covenant theology. A real covenant relation preserves ontological asymmetry, vindicates religious symmetry, and affirms rather than obscures the anthropomorphic tenor of biblical revelation.

This paper proposes a biblical and theological rationale for art education in Christian schools. I first examine art and art education as components of the original, Edenic cultural mandate, and then under the renewed cultural commission signified in the resurrection. I argue that in the post-fall context, the cultural mandate for art and art education must incorporate consciousness of what some have called a cultural 'antithesis'. That is, the practice and teaching of art are properly undertakings of the body of Christ and must be always mindful of sin.

In the following essay, I compare concrete and abstract theological logics, critiquing the latter in favor of a biblical-revelational version of the former. I then move the comparison to the specific issue of biblical interpretation. Abstraction bares its antinomies openly here. The biblical-revelational approach focuses on Son-condescension as the mode of God's every act with regard to not-God. If Son-condescension is the mode of the Creator/creature relation, then it should also be the logic of understanding it. Therefore, I commend a Son-con-descension model for explaining the Creator/creature relation and then more basically as the logic of Christian theism.

Divine conceptualism takes all abstract objects to be propositions in the mind of God. I focus here on necessary propositions and contemporary claims that the laws of logic, understood as necessarily true propositions, provide us with an epistemic bridge to theological predication—specifically, to the claim that God exists. I argue that when contemporary versions of DC say ‘G/god’ they merely rename the notion of necessary truth, and fail to refer to God. Given that God is incomprehensible, epistemic access to the state of propositions in the mind of God is extremely limited.