Emmanuel Boston > Recent Status Updates

The fire will never go out, and the smoke will be seen forever.

A significant slog of style, meandering through a mire of misguided polemics and raising rhetorical questions in confused grammatical constructions while depending on a lexicon to provide the foundation of his arguments. Could have used a good editor and a third of the page count.

The real benefit of Vos' work is the concise, clear delineation of various views with its adherents (even if not strict citations). An excellent resource to gain a grasp of the breadth of possibilities and orient yourself in the discussion... in other words, to not make stupid assumptions or unthoughtful and unwarranted generalizations.

You ever feel out of your league?

The abridgment is superior to the original.

I don't love the meandering digressions. I forgot what reading a "Christian living" book felt like.

After Cyrus died, his son was such a despot that his very lance-bearer led a coup. They killed him and disposed of the body claiming "he was a fraud" to rid the murderer of the title 'regicide'—a title of lowest honor. He marched to Egypt, claimed to be Ra's new son, and then marched to Babylon in the midst of festival and killed the stand-in king claiming "fraud" again. Mene, mene, tekel. This was Darius.

Wild stuff in here...
The ancient Medean King had a dream that his daughter urinated over the entire city so he married her off to a backwater town. He had another dream that a tree grew from between her legs until it shaded the country, so he ordered any child born to be killed. But the soldiers charged with the task dropped the kid off on the hill... The boy grew up and conquered his grandpa. That boy was Cyrus.

So many questions gaining clarity and precision. Knowing how to frame the question well is a significant part to knowing how to answer it well. It's good to have categories into which conflicting thoughts may be placed. Good to know there were people 1000 years ago who have already thought through so many implications.

Bray being Bray. Augustine being Augustine. Nice to have them combined in this volume.

Didn't realize this was technically part of a series ...

Volume 2 releases this year, so inspired by Tony Reinke's meme-ology, I've finally begun reading it. Bavinck is Bavinck. If you know, you know, and if you don't, get initiated!

By this time next week, I will have read approximately 1000 pages of Barth in 13 weeks. Then I'll add another 100-200 pages to write a competent paper in my topic. Of the many things learned and unlearned, question and confirmed, what's the most helpful thing about Barth? Breaking me out my ordinary categories and teaching me that there may yet be other ways of approaching loci that are more Scripturally faithful.

This little book is so delightful, that I fear it may be treated as "not true history" simply because it is not boring!

He willed to make good this affronting and disturbing of His majesty, this devastating of His work, not by avenging Himself on its author, but by Himself bearing the inevitable wrath and perdition,... who had necessarily fallen victim to damnation and death, by allowing His own heart to be wounded by the wrath which, if it had fallen upon man, could only have obliterated and destroyed him. God's eternal decree...

Need to finish section on patience.

Reciprocal exchange... though sometimes the only response is gratitude. Yet for Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, gratitude was a virtue and thus good enough.

"The wrath of God which we had merited, by which we must have been annihilated and would long since have been annihilated, was now in our place borne and suffered as though it had smitten us and yet in such a way that it did not smite us and can no more smite us."

(1) On the one hand, religion is wider than theology. The former is the posture of the whole man towards God; the latter has to do with the inquiries and judgments of his mind only. (2) On the other hand, theology is much wider than religion; as the latter word refers only to human relations, while the former ranges over the relations of all things to God. But (3) their influence on each other is important...

"Grace in itself means primarily that the sin of the creature, the resistance which it opposes to God, cannot check, weaken or render impossible the operation of divine grace. On the contrary, grace shows its power over and against sin. Grace, in fact, presupposes the existence of this opposition. It reckons with it, but does not fear it. It is not limited by it. It overcomes it, triumphing in this opposition..."

"When we say that God is free, the accent does not fall on "free" but on "God."

Excellent treatment on the genre of Acts. Charitable toward other scholarship and inviting of dialogue.

"If goodness is a natural property of God, but something logically distinct from Him, whenever we speak of God as the author of creation, an able mind might be able to imagine the existence of power responsible for bringing together the two that were separate.... So...we have to agree that God is the essence is happiness "