Showing posts with label Andrew Fulford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Fulford. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Thursday, March 09, 2017
Monday, December 05, 2016
Saturday, July 23, 2016
Submission and simplicity
I'll comment on this post:
A basic problem with Andrew's exposition of divine simplicity is that he doesn't address the most controversial refinement. Proponents of divine simplicity often deny that God has any distinct properties or contingent relations. This leads to serious theological confusion. Let's take two examples:
i) A sine qua non of Calvinism is the distinction between God's justice and God's mercy. God is never unjust, but God is sometimes unmerciful. These aren't merely distinct, but sometimes divergent. If, however, justice and mercy are identical, then that erases the distinction between salvation and judgment, election and reprobation.
ii) Calvinists typically grant the traditional distinction between God's absolute power and his ordinate power. Likewise, the Westminster Confession affirms God's counterfactual knowledge (WCF 3.2).
In modern jargon, this is cashed out in terms of possible worlds. The actual world is not the only possible world. Rather, God was at liberty to decree a different world.
If, however, there is no contingency in God's knowledge, volition, or actions, then you have a necessitarian scheme in which everything that happens is absolutely inexorable. It could not be otherwise, even for God. By contrast, Calvinism typically affirms conditional necessity rather than absolute necessity. Put another way, if God does different things in different possible worlds, then God can't be simple–in this radical sense.
Andrew says:
Other readers might immediately wonder how this fits with the Trinity, and they are right to raise the question. However, when the Christian tradition spoke of the Trinity, it must be understood that their entire way of explaining it agreed with simplicity. They explained it in such a way that it could be consistent with this idea. If it seems hard to understand how they could do so, they would agree: They taught that the Trinity was a mystery that was beyond complete human comprehension.
I think that's an illicit appeal to paradox. I have not antecedent objections to mystery or paradox in Christian theology. However, that applies to revealed truths, viz. the Trinity. By contrast, divine simplicity is basically an artifact of philosophical theology. Insofar as philosophical theology relies on natural reason rather than divine revelation, it ought to be accessible and accountable to rational scrutiny.
They did, however, come up with a way of explaining all the scriptural data that pressed the church to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, and it should be said, among those data was the explicit scriptural witness to monotheism. Explanations of the threeness of God that amount to teaching there are three divine beings runs up against not simply squaring themselves with simplicity, but also with monotheism. And indeed, the larger argument of the classical tradition would be that those two ideas, divine simplicity and monotheism, are not accidentally linked, but rather are two sides of the same coin.
i) That's equivocal because it confounds simplicity with singularity or unicity. To affirm that there is only one God hardly entails that God has no distinct properties or contingent relations.
ii) In addition, I'm struck by how many Christians think it's more important to protect the Trinity against the appearance of tritheism than unitarianism. Yet unitarianism is at least as heretical as tritheism.
Finally, Andrew expounds Dyotheletism, but he doesn't explain the relevance of that issue to EFS.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Monday, July 27, 2015
On Sola Scriptura: Andrew Fulford responds (robustly!) to Edward Feser
This is beautiful because Feser is pulling out all of the "best" Roman Catholic arguments, and he's getting whomped pretty clearly here.
https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/07/27/all-that-the-prophets-have-spoken-a-rejoinder-to-feser-pt-1/
https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/07/27/all-that-the-prophets-have-spoken-a-rejoinder-to-feser-pt-1/
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Monday, May 06, 2013
An Exegetical Definition of Natural Law
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| a fledgeling oak tree |
In his first installment here, he is actually quite short of actual exegesis and relies more heavily on Aristotle, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis and Dr. Edward Feser.
A couple of quick points he develops: First, what “Natural Law” is not:
1. Natural law is not mechanistic and exceptionless.
2. Natural law is not autonomous or independent in relation to God.
3. Natural law is not the ius gentium.
Second, what “Natural Law” is:
1. It is a divinely imposed order intrinsic in the beings that exist.
2. This divinely imposed order has “value” built in; “is” and “ought” are identical in it.
His point:
Given this conception of natural law, the main purpose of this series will be to show that Scripture assumes this concept reflects reality. To be more specific, I will attempt to prove the following proposition are supported by the Bible:
(N1) there is an objective order to the universe of the kind described above.
(N2) this order is objectively visible; it is there to be seen, whether one is wearing the spectacles of scripture or not.
(N3) at least some unregenerate people perceive see this order.
One might like to see more actual exegesis within an “exegetical case for Natural Law”. The fact that he is defining the term with sources outside of Scripture gives some cause to be wary, but they’ve been doing excellent work at The Calvinist International and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt at this point.
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