Josiah C > Recent Status Updates

I really like that Mounce emphasizes recognizing patterns over rote memorization.

Chapter one may be the best thing I’ve read on conversion.

While I’m not sure I would have appreciated it then, I really wish I had this book as a freshman in Bible college. It should be required reading for first year divinity and seminary students.

Calvin’s chapter on each part of the world governed by providence is terrifying and delightful.

Haldane gives another very compelling argument for Sabbatarianism from Isaiah. In Isaiah’s prophecies of the Messianic age, there is an expectation of Sabbath keeping (56:2-7). Jesus even quotes one of these passages, “my house will be a house of prayer for all nations,” announcing the Messianic age at the cleansing of the temple. Just a few verses before in Isaiah the Gentile keeping the Sabbath is prophesied.

Haldane gives a compelling argument for Sabbatarianism that I have not heard before. In Mt 24, Jesus speaks of the destruction of the temple, i.e., a time where ceremonial Jewish rites are explicitly abolished and yet he tells his disciples to hope that they do not have to flee on the Sabbath, showing that the Sabbath is not abrogated with the abrogation of those ceremonial rites (Mt 24:20).

Understanding Romans 14 to abrogate Sabbath keeping under the New Covenant “…is a most pernicious error, an error exhibiting great ignorance of spiritual things and one highly calculated to retard the progress of the Christian divine life.”

Calvin’s articulation of the eternal generation of the Son as well as his defense of the Angel of Jehovah in the Old Testament being Christ is masterful.

This has been even more helpful than the Mortification of Sin so far. In chapter 6, Owen gives a strong warning to not think we are strong enough to resist any temptation ourselves given the several biblical examples of men much stronger in faith than us who have fallen prey to temptation.

Pretty weak so far

Helopoulos does a good job in the first chapter showing the connection between the sacraments and God’s covenant as well as showing that the sacraments of circumcision and baptism are not primarily about what the recipient does in receiving but what God does in giving.

Vincent’s articulation of the distinctions in person between the persons of the Trinity is excellent.

In his very short chapter on church history Malone wrongly presents Tertullian as a credobaptist, ignores Origen’s claim that infant baptism was universal at his time, Augustine’s claim that he had never met a credobaptist, and the 66 ministers at the Synod of Carthage assuming paedobaptism and deciding it should not be held off until the 8th day.

Wasn’t a huge fan of ch. 1. The divide they place between biblical and systematic theology is unwarranted and I think it will play out in the rest of the book. The goal of the book itself I don’t think is a good one. Finding a middle way between dispensationalism and covenant theology is unnecessary.

“For this I dare say, that of all religious exercises, there is none in which God has been less honored, or men less edified than in the singing of Psalms.”

This was recommended by a Presbyterian pastor and is giving me a bit more trouble so far than anything I’ve read on paedobaptism before.

On the sufficiency and superiority of the Psalter as opposed to uninspired man-made hymns, Bushell’s argument is very straightforward. We have an inspired songbook, that songbook is about Christ according to Jesus and the NT authors, we are commanded to sing that songbook and are not commanded to compose our own songs for worship.

Bushell asserts in the introduction that being convinced of exclusive psalmody often begins in the heart rather than the mind. When a person begins singing the Psalms regularly, he wonders why anyone would ever want to sing anything else in worship.