Josiah C > Recent Status Updates

Connecting dots in church history that I hadn’t before has been great in this book. I knew that Constantine had called for the Council of Nicaea but hadn’t realized that he was there arguing against Arianism himself along with Athanasius and others.

Chapter 7 concerning early monasticism was especially interesting. Needham shows that monasticism was pretty universally noble. The appendix to this chapter shows that John Calvin commended early monasticism while condemning the monasticism of his time.

The stories of the martyrs and persecuted in chapter 6 are brutal, especially of the women. Pagan emperors would send their governors to sexually abuse Christian women and at times the women would commit suicide rather than have their bodies defiled showing that they valued their purity before God over their lives.

Needham gives great evidences for the genuine conversion of Constantine.

Clement of Rome sounds like a Calvinist

The first part of this book which was biographical was really helpful. The second part is helpful in seeing the development of Calvin’s doctrine, but I’d rather read Calvin than read others explain his doctrine.

This book has been so helpful in summarizing the lives and doctrine of the church fathers so far.

This book is a paedobaptist showing that paedobaptism is not present in church history until the 3rd century and that the early church fathers credobaptists. Weird but true lol

Two things I always find interesting about the church fathers is their comfort with allegory and their emphasis and mystical experiences in prayer.

Wilson does a good job in chapter 14 showing the the American War for Independence was a just war as opposed to other revolutions like the French revolution.

Sanger upheld Malthusian eugenics and Arian white supremacy. She is lauded as a hero by feminists today but held Hitlerian theories of dysgenic peoples. Her goal in placing abortion clinics in Jewish, Black, and Hispanic communities was to kill them without them realizing it. She hired Black people to promote this “healthcare” saying that they were too stupid to realize they were aiding in their own annihilation.

The chapter on teaching boys to interacts with girls and sex was great. Respect and love for women needs to start in the home with the boy’s mother and sisters. This will lead to respecting and loving women outside of the home, especially his future wife, rightly.

Intro and ch. 1 were great. He says that many Baptists become Presbyterians because they find greater Reformed fellowship there and allow baptism to be a secondary issue. He calls Baptists back to their Reformed roots expressed in the London Baptist Confession of 1689 and shows that “good and necessary inference,” as John Murray says, is not sufficient to establish our understanding of any sacrament.

The chapter on fighting, competition, and sports was really helpful. There are great tips on the benefits of boys playing sports and being taught to fight when it is necessary which includes actually teaching them how and when to fight.

The opening chapter of the book was really helpful in showing that we cannot root the identity of God primarily as “Creator” or “Ruler” but as Trinity.

I’ve only read the preface and feel like I don’t even need to read the rest lol. He shows that paedobaptism contradicts the regulative principle of worship and that an instituted sacrament of the church must be based on explicit New Testament commands and not good and necessary inferences to the Old Testament.

Shockingly weak exegesis on the chapter that sets out to defend paedobaptism from the New Testament. Murray consistently imposes the covenantal system, mainly the representative principle, onto texts that have nothing to do with baptism.

Chapter 5 on training boys to chew “doctrinal meat” was helpful. They need to be taught to embrace the sovereignty of God and an optimistic view of the future.

Murray’s arguments that “baptizō” does not mean “immerse” are surprisingly weak. They are mostly based on extra-biblical sources and doing exegetical gymnastics in passages like Romans 6.

I really appreciated Wilson covering possible dangerous presumptions parenting in both a covenantal paedobaptistic and baptistic framework. Paedobaptists have to avoid presuming that their children are permanent branches of the covenant while baptistic parents must not presume that their children should not be called to covenant obligations from childhood.

The chapter on union with Christ was beautiful. Union with Christ is the umbrella under which all other aspects of the application of redemption fall. Murray is humble in granting that it is a mystery that cannot be fully known.

The first chapter was great. Raising our boys in Christ-like masculinity we should raise them to be lords (subduers), saviors (rescuers), husbandmen (tenders), sages (wisemen), and glory-bearers (embracing the image of God).

I have appreciated Wilson’s emphasis thus far on leading with the proclamation of the gospel. As the leaven of the gospel leavens the loaf of the world, Christian governments come toward the back end when the loaf has been thoroughly leavened by faithful proclamation and mass conversion as a result.

The chapter on perseverance of the saints was excellent. He refuted both the common view of “eternal security” that says that although someone seems to fall away after processing faith, they are still secure as well as the Arminian view of potential security. Mainly he points to Romans 8, John 6, and John 10.

The chapter on adoption was great. Murray shows that while both the Son of God and the sons of God, i.e., the elect, relate to God as Father, a distinction between the relationships must be upheld. The Son of God is the Son by eternal generation while the elect are sons of God by adoption. We both relate to the first person of the Trinity as Father but in distinct ways.