Recently K. Scott Oliphint of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia has published a book which he has called Covenantal Apologetics. I reviewed the book here and recommend it. But I expressed reservations about the writer’s agenda of rebranding Van Til’s apologetic teaching in line with the book’s title. Coming as it does from one of the foremost representatives of Van Til’s presuppositional approach around the thesis deserves attention. As I said in my review, by “Covenantal” Oliphint means the ‘covenants’ of covenant …
Category: Covenant Theology
Part One, Two, Three The Question of the Incarnate Christ What do we do with Christ’s human soul in this matter of transmission? Do we commit the Apollinarian heresy of the Early Church, which says Christ had a human body but a divine soul? Or are we to fall into the Eutychian heresy, where Christ was said to have had a human body mixed with the divine soul? Those are not orthodox positions. But there are certain passages which speak …
This is the belated third installment of a series I started last year on the topic. I do apologize for dropping the ball on this one. The material is taken from a lecture from the course, “The Doctrine of Man & Sin” at Telos Biblical Institute. Part Two The Traducianist Position: Traducianism (from a word meaning ‘to sprout’), holds that both the material-bodily substance of a person, and the soulish part of a person is passed on from parent to child …
Review of Covenantal Apologetics: Principles & Practices in Defense of Our Faith, by K. Scott Oliphint, Wheaton: Crossway, 2013, 277 pages, pbk. K. Scott Oliphint is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has written several good books of apologetics and philosophical theology; most notably his Reasons for Faith and God with Us. He is, as far as my opinion counts, the main successor to Van Til and Bahnsen and their apologetic approach. This …
Part Three This is my final installment in my lengthy review of G. K. Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology. During the previous three parts of the review I have tried to provide the thrust of Beale’s “already-not yet new creational” model with few critical remarks (though, as a “Dispensationalist” I clearly have a bias against the author’s new way of presenting covenant theology). In this piece I shall enter into criticism more plainly. I had envisaged a detailed critique …
Part Two As we continue to the end of this impressive book we come to the second part of Beale’s two chapter treatment of supercessionism (although the doctrine permeates the whole work). The author is among those who believe all the phenomena in Joel’s prophecy recited by Peter on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:16-21 came to pass, even though it didn’t really. But that is ancillary to his argument, which is that the prophecy was aimed at Israel …
Part One The Argument of the Book (continued) I said in the first part of this review that Beale is a supercessionist (he believes the Church is the “true Israel”), and the second half of the book makes this crystal clear (although it is not absent from the first half). Although building on things said in the first half, I found the allusions and Beale’s interpretations of them (especially in light of what was overlooked in the contexts), to be …
A Review of G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011, xiv + 1047 pages, hdbk, $54.99. G. K. Beale is among the most prominent evangelical scholars. He is acknowledged in the evangelical world as being something of an expert on the relationship of the OT to the New. Together with D.A. Carson he is the general editor of the Commentary of the Use of the Old Testament in the New, and the subtitle of …
I thought I would put this up here as I put a little effort into it and I need to post 🙂 Some of the men in our Church are reading through the new book edited by D. A. Carson & T. Keller, The Gospel as Center. I was given the chapters on Scripture and Creation to write about. Here is what I wrote about chapter 3, “The Gospel and Scripture: How to Read the Bible.” “Hello, Pastor asked me …
These guidelines test the “distance” between a given theological proposal and the actual textual references alleged to lend them authority. As already mentioned in previous posts, all the major non-negotiable doctrines of the Christian Faith have a strong affinity with the wording of the biblical text. Under the “Grid of Category Formulations” of these “Rules of Affinity” all these first level doctrines are C1 and C2 doctrines. Doctrinal propositions which are arrived at by the consent of several converging biblical …
