Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Curt Daniel on Calvinism

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On our honeymoon in July 2004, I brought along a small pile of books (which I didn’t finish until after we returned home!). I did, however, manage to work through a good chunk of this one:

  1. This excellent work is bound like a typewritten dissertation and is a compilation of handouts that Daniel used to accompany a series of messages delivered from 1987-1989.
  2. The 75 lectures are available for free downloading here. (My wife listened to all 75 of them on her MP3 player!)
  3. Daniel is an expert in Calvinism as evidenced by his Ph.D. dissertation on John Gill, which is some 900 pages long (University of Edinburgh, 1983).
  4. He divides his work on Calvinism into seventy-four chapters, which are handouts he used for lecturing on the topic.
  5. My first impression of the book was poor: (1) the format is unpleasant to the eye with tight line-spacing and a font resembling an old typewriter, and (2) Daniel does not formally cite his sources in footnotes.
  6. My impression changed, however, as I read the book from cover to cover. The first twenty-four chapters (pp. 1-172, 36% of the book) are the most enlightening. It covers the history of Calvinism in an irenic, informative way and includes chapters on Augustine; the Reformation; Calvin; Puritans; Westminster Assembly; Covenant Theology; High Calvinism; Amyraldism; Hyper-Calvinism; Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism; Princeton Theology; Calvinistic Baptists; and Dutch Calvinism. Each chapter ends with a select bibliography.
  7. I recently learned from Phil Johnson that this is available for free as a Word doc! (I bought my hard copy for $30.) [Update: It is also available for free as a 574-page PDF!]

Two Convicting Quotes from Piper on Owen

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I read this article this morning:

I found these two quotations particularly convicting and challenging:

  • “Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them, ‘. . . communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.'”
  • “One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is a terrible hardening of the spiritual life.”

Decker’s Summary of Porter

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Last week I finished reading the most challenging Greek monograph I’ve ever worked through:

Earlier this week I was very thankful to discover this:

  • Rodney Decker. “The Poor Man’s Porter.” This is a thirty-page “condensation and summarization” of Porter’s seminal work. I wish that I had read Decker before reading Porter! So if you are planning to work through Porter’s volume, you may be better off by reading Decker first.

For a relatively recent survey of verbal aspect theory (in language much more understandable than Porter!), see this:

Related: Andrew David Naselli, “A Brief Introduction to Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 12 (2007): 17–28.

“Although” or “Because”?

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What is the use of the adverbial participle ὑπάρχων in Philippians 2:6?
1. concessive: “although”?
2. causal: “because”?
3. something else?

  • GNT ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ,
  • NASB who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, [cf. ESV, NET, NRS, NLT, NAB]
  • NIV Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, [cf. Tyndale, Geneva Bible, KJV, NKJV, HCSB]

It appears that all of the major English translations render ὑπάρχων either (1) concessively or (2) nebulously or generically (e.g., “being” or “existing”). I haven’t found a single translation that renders it causally. Yet I’m becoming more convinced that a causal interpretation is the most likely. This evening I read a paragraph that reinforces this view (D. A. Carson, Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996], 44-45):

  • [T]he opening expression, both in Greek and in English, is slightly ambiguous. The phrase “being in very nature God” could be understood in one of two ways. It could be understood concessively: although he was in very nature God, he took the form of a servant. Or it could be understood causally: because he was in very nature God, he took the form of a servant. On the whole, the latter better suits the context. The eternal Son did not think of his status as God as something that gave him the opportunity to get and get and get. Instead, his very status as God meant he had nothing to prove, nothing to achieve. And precisely because he is one with God, one with this kind of God, he “made himself nothing” and gave and gave and gave.