Noah Lykins > Recent Status Updates

“The modern age made the human will the arbiter of all things. In late modernity, following Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), we have reduced life to a struggle of the will. Modernity has consistently attempted to make God come to heel, as if it were possible, to make his will subservient to ours. This is an ancient impulse. It is the program of hell, of course, repackaged for every age.”

“Kuyper had an organic view of revelation—by this he meant that God's revelation of himself is as one whole. The Bible is not a disconnected set of anthologies — it is a whole. It is one.
This is an important point that is often ignored in fundamentalist proof texting.”

The conceited notion that we need only to open the Scriptures in order to cite from it this or that text does not for a moment withstand serious scrutiny. This may partly suffice in letting the believer know his duty vis-à-vis the government, but it is of virtually no value for understanding… how government needs to discharge that calling down to the details in order to act in conformity with God's law. (CG III)

“Theology has flourished only at times when theologians have continued in prayer and, in prayer, have sought the communion of the Holy Spirit, and, on the other hand, theology loses its leaf and begins its winter sleep when ambition for learning silences prayer in the breast of theologians.”

Prayer was integral to theology for Kuyper.

Theology was not merely an academic discipline, it "was not a dry abstraction, nor a cold intellectual speculation or scholastic hair-splitting, but it gripped his soul as the power of God's truth." It was to be done with prayer and with the communion of the Holy Spirit.

Dooyeweerd puts it:
“[Kuyper] lifted Calvinism, the most radically biblical movement within the Protestant Reformation, out of the narrow sphere of dogmatic theology where it had languished during centuries of inner decline. He raised it to the level of an all-encompassing worldview “

But to him who directs his eye to salvation and desires it, and asks with boldness and vehemence for its bestowal, the good Father who is in heaven will give the true purification and the changeless life. To whom, by His Son Jesus Christ, the Lord of the living and dead, and by the Holy Spirit, be glory, honour, power, eternal majesty, both now and ever, from generation to generation, and from eternity to eternity.

on amil - “…the locus of Christ’s ascension-power is the suffering church.”

“The presence of the wind over the waters in Gen. 8:1 recalls the presence of the Spirit over the deep in 1:2, marking the advent of the re-creation process.” Flood as paradigm for subsequent judgement events

“Like Melchizedek before him—and Christ after him—Joshua is going to be both king and priest... "crown" in Zechariah 6:11 is actually plural in the original Hebrew, and he argued that what is going on here is that two crowns are being placed on the one man Joshua... this event clearly symbolizes the union of the priestly and kingly offices in one man, which is obviously designed to point ahead to Christ.”

“John Bolt rightly describes resistance to the biblical covenants as ‘methodological Biblicism.’ “

“The widespread prevalence today of the private, devotional use of "tongues, I suspect, stems from a flawed conviction, perhaps intensified in the West by the arid rationalism of the post-Enlightenment, postmodern times in which we live-the conviction that in religious experience the nonrational and intuitive is more immediate and primal than the rational and word-bound.”

“… the completion of the canon and the ceasing of inspired, infallible revelation stand or fall together.”

Second read! Taking my gap year students through this.

“…Synod accepted De Witt's formulation as a way of preserving unity in university and Church, and preventing damaging rifts, 3 even though Hoornbeeck, and many others, saw that the placard's apparent subordination of philosophy to theology was only superficial and that the essential point was the separation, and therefore freeing, of philosophy from its tutelage to theology.”

“edict, adopted in October, proclaimed that philosophy and theology each had their proper sphere, and should be kept separate, but that where unavoidable overlap occurred, and apparent disparity between theological and philosophical truth arose, philosophy professors must defer to the theologians and refrain from interpreting Scripture contentiously according to their principles. The South Holland Synod accepted”

masterful writing.