Today our church, Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, observed the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation with a special worship service. Our minister, Dr. Clyde Ervine, preached on Ezekiel 34:1-13a and Romans 10:6-17. The choir sang this wonderful version of Psalm 46 set to the Anglican chant version of Ein’ Feste Burg:
Two psalms, 27 and 103, were sung from the Scottish Psalter of 1650, whose version of Psalm 46 follows below:
Praise God for John Calvin, John Knox and other Reformers, who worked so tirelessly and fearlessly for the sake of the gospel.
November 1st, 2010 | 1:58 pm | #1
Try as I may, I simply cannot accept Calvin as a good Christian theologian. Calvinism makes God the author of evil.
November 1st, 2010 | 3:10 pm | #2
And I suppose Arminius makes God the God of vacillation and indecisiveness?
November 1st, 2010 | 4:29 pm | #3
I am sorry to inform you of this, Orthodoxj, but an appeal to human free will hardly solves the problem of evil, because this will is itself a creature of God. Doesn’t it still make God the author of evil in some sense?
November 1st, 2010 | 4:33 pm | #4
No because freedom is of itself wholly a good.
November 1st, 2010 | 9:00 pm | #5
A good cannot exist apart from God and certainly does not precede him. God is the origin of all good.
November 2nd, 2010 | 8:12 am | #6
David T. Koyzis: “Praise God for John Calvin, John Knox and other Reformers, who worked so tirelessly and fearlessly for the sake of the gospel.”
Praise God indeed for John Calvin and the other Reformers.
November 2nd, 2010 | 4:45 pm | #7
David, I’m sure I don’t disagree with that.
All good is indeed in and of God. God gives us freedom because that is God’s nature, to bestow only good on His creatures. We can use our freedom for evil, because if we couldn’t it wouldn’t be freedom. So if it would be a good for God to makes us do good, to say keep Cain form killing abel; it is a greater good for God to refrain from making Cain into a hand puppet, despite what he will choose to do with his freedom. God is not responsible for killing Abel, only for allowing Cain to be a free being. In other words apparently God regards a world in which Cain is His puppet to be worse than one in which Cain murders Abel.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact