Light to the nations

Yahweh’s Servant will be set up as a light to the nations to bring salvation to the ends of the earth (49:6). Sounds nice. What does it look like? The chiastically arranged verse 7 tells us: A. Yahweh, Redeemer of Israel, Holy One B. To the despised/abhorred One C. To Servant of rulers . . . . Continue Reading »

Poetry of Isaiah 49:17

In Isaiah 47:17 Yahweh assures Zion that He has not forgotten her, but will disburse her enemies and gather her children. The verse is wonderfully musical. The first and last words of the verse are plural verbs ending in “oo”: meharu and yetz’u . The two words are not only . . . . Continue Reading »

A noble tradition

Holmes ( God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards , x)) considers the Reformed tradition a “noble” tradition. But in his view it is not so in contemporary England where “the title ‘Reformed’ too often refers to a theology and church . . . . Continue Reading »

True Man

Out of controversy with Lutherans on Christology and Eucharist, Holmes notes ( God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards ,136-7), grew a remarkable insight into Christology. English Reformed theologians like Sibbes, Owen, and Edward Irving argued that “the . . . . Continue Reading »

Is God Selfish?

God’s end in creation is Himself, to glorify Himself. Does that make God selfish? No, Edwards says, and for two reasons (cf. Holmes, God of Grace and God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards , 58-61). First is an overtly Trinitarian answer. Virtue is to love God, also for . . . . Continue Reading »

Atomism and Substance

Jonathan Edwards was the first, Stephen Holmes claims (in an essay in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian ), “on the American continent to have read Newton and Locke, and arguably amongst the first in the world to have appreciated the implications of what they had to say” (101). . . . . Continue Reading »

Triune Simplicity

Recent interpreters of Jonathan Edwards’s theology have suggested that he denies or qualifies various aspects of classical theism, particularly the simplicity of God, the notion that whatever is in God is God. Kyle Strobel ( Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (T&T Clark . . . . Continue Reading »

Wheels of Time

Jonathan Edwards considered the wheels of Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot to be a type of the history of the world: “The whole universe is a machine which god hath made for his own use, to be his chariot for him to ride in; as is represented in Ezekiel’s vision. In this chariot . . . . Continue Reading »