“God’s end in his eternal purpose of creating the world, and of the sum of his purposes with respect to creatures, was to procure a spouse, or a mystical body, for his Son.” —Jonathan Edwards on election, The “Miscellanies” 1245
New in 2024. See my chapter 16: “Jonathan Edwards on Election”
A New England Disputation on Providence, Presided over by the acting vice-President of Harvard College, Samuel Willard (1640-1707).
The year was 1702: The question was: “Whether the immutability of the decree denies the freedom of a creature? This was denied by the respondent Francis Goodhue, a master’s student. To learn why and what students learned about providence at Harvard, as well as Yale, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Brown), see the book below, Yesteryear’s Faith Seeking Understanding.
“Many thanks to Philip Fisk for his herculean labors in keeping scholastic argumentation regarding the doctrine of God’s providence and the freedom of the will on the minds and hearts of scholars and pastors alike. We need the kind of careful thinking that work like this requires, in our churches most obviously, but even in the academy, where painstaking reasoning and fair-minded conversation are rarer than most people understand.”
—Douglas A. Sweeney, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University
Week 12
God’s Passions and Immutability
This Lord’s day, I met with the Presbyterian divine and pastor Stephen Charnock (1628-80) and asked him about a troubling thought many have —whether God ever repents and changes his mind, and if so, how does he remain immutable?
“Written with scholastic discernment, delightful to read, and deeply practical in its application.”
“Fisk invites readers to travel back in time with him to early modern lecture halls. This volume is for anyone who wants to reflect on the wisdom of classic Reformed figures.”
Jonathan Edwards and the Classic-Reformed Tradition is my award-winning book (Edwardseana, 2017 TIU) that addresses the question of whether we live in a fated world of necessity or one over which God reigns with sovereignty and in which human beings possess robust free choice, according to the classic-Reformed tradition of freedom, necessity, and contingency.
New in 2022!
“A proposition about the past can be contingent. Logic thesis 20.”
See my Introductory Chapter. “On Knowing God: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.”
And
Chapter Two “The Incomprehensibility and Knowability of God in Protestant Prolegomena.”
“God himself is the final transcendental signified. Signifiers, types, tropes, metaphors, and images of divine things embody transcendent truths.
God’s goodness moves the pleasure of his good-willing to will objects of beauty into existence. Then God is inclined to the beauty he himself brought into existence. Such is God’s love of benevolence..”
“The classical Western tradition of early modern Christianity since Plato, with the exception of nominalist strains, assumes that the inherent meaning of the words of a proposition make a truth claim about the actual world, and refer to a transcendent reality beyond language itself, and beyond the human mind.”
See my chapter on Jonathan Edwards’s “Controversies Notebook” and Whether Reality is Open and Contingent or Closed and Necessitated.
“Any approach to the study of Jonathan Edwards must deal with the author’s breadth of material, both published and unpublished. When it comes to interpreting Edwards’s view of reality, there is a noticeable tension between the notes on predestination in his unpublished ‘Controversies’ Notebook and his published work, Freedom of the Will. ”
See my chapter: Que Sera, Sera. The Controversial 1702 Harvard Commencement Quaestio on Whether the Immutability of God’s Decree Takes Away Human Freedom of the Will.
Any approach to Samuel Willard, Jonathan Edwards, and the classic-Reformed tradition must take into account the broad consensus concerning the contingency of all things outside God himself, and the primacy of God’s will.
From Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, & Thought
Quaestio: “Whether the influx of divine providence removes contingency from all states of affairs and urges severe necessity? No, it does not.”
From my chapter on Petrus van Mastricht and Freedom of the Will.
The significance for late Reformed orthodoxy of Van Mastricht’s disputations that are related to freedom of the will is the broad and comprehensive framework they give for understanding essential arguments against the prominent opponents and movements that were challenging the classic-Reformed tradition in that day.
From Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation
Week 36 Commission: The Euthyphro mystery requires another Lord’s Day to ponder God’s double will and how the precepts of God’s will are never in conflict with the good pleasure of his will."
Gen 18:16-33 Ps19:7-11 Rom 3:4-6
From A Book of Faith Seeking Understanding: Fifty-Two Lord’s Day Readings
“O our God . . . We are powerless before this great multitude that has come against us, and do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You.”
“Trust firmly in the LORD your God and you will stand firm.”
2 Chron 20:12, 20 JPS
Praises be forever to God the Son, who is “Jesus (Yeshua) the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
Matt 1:1 NRSV