He will not be shut out of His world

Along with a few other books of substance, I am currently working through John Frame's The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Can we know God? Really and truly? These are legitimate questions in this day of subjective truth and post-modern sensibilities. Frame responds in the affirmative:

Scripture, at any rate, is clear: God is both knowable and known. He is known truly, known as He really is. Some people have argued that because our knowledge of God comes through revelation and then through our senses, reason, and imagination, it cannot be a knowledge of God as He really is but only of how He appears to us . . . In Scripture, reality (God in particular) is known, and our sense, reason, and imagination are themselves revelations of God-means that God uses to drive His truth home to us. God is Lord; He will not be shut out of His world. (33, emphasis mine)

Blogged Through Books - The Doctrine of God

Blogged Through Books is a series that I hope to continue regularly. I will use posts from this blog that have already been produced for a particular book and will compile them all in one post. This will give the reader access to all of the content concerning particular books, as it appears on this blog, in one convenient location. In the near future I hope to write a post about the benefits of blogging through a book. This post focuses on a book that has been very influential in my Christian journey; The Doctrine of God by John Frame.

Here is a list of posts on The Doctrine of God:

• Transcendence and Immanence
• More from Frame: Could Jesus Sin?
• From Frame's "The Doctrine of God"
• Quotes from The Doctrine of God
• Quotes from Frame on Ethics, Epistemology and Metaphysics
• John Frame on God's providential, redemptive-historical preservation
• Frame and Edwards on transcendence
• Frame on the 6 days of creation
• All Scripture is anthropomorphic
• Ex nihilo
• Frame on God's Attributes
• Is God's love coercive?
• Frame on common grace
• Virtues least practiced
• Hate as a divine attribute of God
• As he is righteous, so he is logical
• What God Cannot Do and a Few Other Lists
• Heading for home!
• His own criterion
• Aseity
• Of sufficient weight
• Frame on the Lordship of God
• I AM WHO I AM
• The Efficacy of God's Control
• Human Decisions
• Foreordination of sinful decisions
• Summary of Chapter 4 from The Doctrine of God
• Some quotes from Chapter 5 - The Lordship Attributes: Authority in The Doctrine of God
• Frame on God's Covenant Presence

I strongly encourage any and all of you to read this book! Perhaps a perusal of the posts above will whet your appetite for more of Frame's writing in The Doctrine of God.

Frame on Jesus' personal words

From The Doctrine of the Word of God by John Frame:

Jesus' personal words are of utmost importance to the message of the NT. There is no trace of any development from a word-centered revelation in the OT to a nonverbal revelation in the NT. Quite the contrary. Jesus' personal words are crucial to his ministry. In the community of his disciples, his word is the supreme criterion of discipleship. Jesus teaches that calling him Lord is meaningless unless we do the will of his Father (Matt. 7:21-23). The will of his Father is to be found in the law of Moses (Matt. 5:17-20), and also in Jesus' own words (7:24-29). Those who hear Jesus' words and do them will be like the wise man who built his house on the rock. Those who do not hear and obey will be like the fool who built his house on sand. (61)

Frame and Poythress

Well, I have allowed the blog to sit on the 1500th post for a couple of days. This was not intentional, unless you consider procrastination intentional. Post #1501 will not be groundbreaking or paradigm-shifting. I'll just make you aware of a wonderful resource for your edification and sanctification.

The Works of John Frame and Vern Poythress is a site which contents are exactly what they suggest. The site has a collection of resources from Frame and Poythress which includes-or will include-articles, ebooks, audio files, and course materials. This is a great gift to the body of Christ!

I have read two of Frames book: The Doctrine of God and The Doctrine of the Word of God. Both were excellent and the former title in particular had a huge impact that continues to this day. I thoroughly enjoy how Frame writes and I find what he writes to be significant. I have not read any of Poythress' books, but I have read numerous articles by him that have also been well-worth the time invested.

If you search "John Frame" on this blog you will see my interaction with the aforementioned titles.

Take a look at this site and enjoy!

Frame on subjectivity and Scripture

In his book entitled The Doctrine of the Word of God, John Frame states "In Scripture, subjective revelation is the Spirit's illumination of objective revelation" (36).

He goes on to explain, "Orthodox Reformed theology does not reject a subjective element in revelation, but it formulates it rather differently. In a Reformed understanding, there is both objective and subjective revelation. God reveals himself in creation and in Scripture, objectively. But that objective revelation is of no use to us unless the Holy Spirit illumines our hearts and minds. As sinners, we suppress God's revelation (Romans 1 again). It is the gracious regenerating work of the Spirit that enables us to understand, believe, and obey. So on the Reformed view, there is a sense in which revelation is not completed until it becomes subjective by the Spirit's work."

Authority of God's word

This is what it means when we say that God's word is authoritative. The authority of God's word varies broadly according to the many functions I have listed. when God communicates information, we are obligated to believe it. When he tells us to do something, we are obligated to obey. When he tells us a parable, we are obligated to place ourselves in the narrative and meditate on the implications of that. When he expresses affection, we are obligated to appreciate and reciprocate. When he gives us a promise, we are obligated to trust. Let's define authority of language as its capacity to create an obligation in the hearer. So the speech of an absolute authority creates absolute obligation. (Frame, John M. The Doctrine of the Word of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Pub., 2010. Print. 5)

A few blog posts

Here are two posts I came across on different blogs that I thought were particularly good:

From Miscellanies,

Extrabiblical Books and Scripture’s Sufficiency

Without extrabiblical literature we cannot make use of the Bible, argues John Frame. He makes this point in a chapter on the sufficiency of scripture (ch 32) in his new book, The Doctrine of the Word of God (P&R, 2010), 220–238. On pages 232–233, Frame writes this of our need of extrabiblical books in order to properly apply Scripture to our lives:

All our use of Scripture depends on our knowledge of extrabiblical data. Scripture contains no lessons in Hebrew or Greek grammar. To learn that, we must study extrabiblical information. Similarly, the other means that enable us to use Scripture, such as textual criticism, text editing, translation, publication, teaching, preaching, concordances, and commentaries, all depend on extrabiblical data. So in one sense even the first premises of moral syllogisms, the normative premises, depend on extrabiblical knowledge. So without extrabiblical premises, without general revelation, we cannot use Scripture at all.

Then he writes:

None of those considerations detracts from the primacy of Scripture as we have described it. Once we have a settled conviction of what Scripture teaches, that conviction must prevail over all other sources of knowledge. So Scripture must govern even the sciences that are used to analyze it: textual criticism, hermeneutics, and so on. … Scripture must remain primary. …

Frame’s argument culminates here:

Certainly, it is a misunderstanding, then, to think that the sufficiency of Scripture rules out the necessity of extrabiblical information. At every stage of our use of Scripture, we should legitimately refer both to the content of Scripture and to extrabiblical revelation. But each in its proper place: when we are convinced that a teaching is the teaching of Scripture itself (even when we used extrabiblical information in reaching that conviction), that teaching must take precedence over any conclusion derived from outside Scripture.

And from The Resurgence,

The Six-Second Kiss

Jani Ortlund

Marriage

What can six seconds do for you? Woman to woman, let me encourage you that just six seconds a day can help safeguard your marriage.

How you say goodbye as you and your husband begin your day can help you build a lifelong romance. Ray and I say send each other off each morning with a six-second kiss, and after 39 years of marriage, I highly recommend it!

After years of a quick shout from somewhere near the back door, it started with “Goodbye, honey. See you tonight . . .” which left us both wanting more. It stopped when we decided that before we went out to face our day we would scout the other out, wrap each other up in a warm embrace, and begin our day with an intimate, very married, six-second kiss.

Try it. Tomorrow when you say goodbye, take your husband’s face in your hands. Look deeply into his eyes. Ask him to hold you for just six seconds. Tell him you love him. Admire him. Tell him you can’t wait until the day is done and you’ll have time together again, and then kiss him like you mean it.

Go ahead. Try it! Your young children will grow up feeling secure in the love between their parents. Your adolescents will blush, groan, and hope their friends don’t see you. Your teens will hope that someday they can build a marriage like their parents. And if there are no children around? Hmmmm, now there’s an interesting situation!

“Scarcely had I passed them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go . . .” Song of Solomon 3:4

God's Sovereignty

Speaking of how one articulates the truths associated with God's sovereignty in general, and His sovereignty over evil in particular, John Frame wrote this in His excellent work The Doctrine of God: "Our language must not compromise either God's full sovereignty or His holiness and goodness."

With that in mind, I will once again post on this blog the best example that I have come across of someone articulating this truth in a manner that meets the criteria that Frame introduces above.

"To put it bluntly, God stands behind evil in such a way that not even evil takes place outside the bounds of his sovereignty, yet the evil is not morally chargeable to him: it is always chargeable to the secondary agents, to secondary causes [i.e., those who actually do it]. On the other hand, God stands behind good in such a way that it not only takes place within the bounds of his sovereignty, but it is always chargeable to him, and only derivatively to secondary agents...If this sound just a bit too convenient for God, my initial response (though there is more to be said) is that according to the Bible this is the only God there is."

Aseity

From The Doctrine of God by John Frame:

Support for the general aseity (independence, self-existence, self-sufficiency, self-containment) of God:

1. God owns all things - Gen. 14:19, 22; Ps. 24:1; Ps. 50:10-12
2. Everything possessed by creatures comes from God - Ex. 20:11; Neh. 9:6; Ps. 146:5-6
3. When we give something back to God, we give him only what he has first given us - Luke 12:42, 16:1-8; Titus 1:7
4. When we give something back to God, he is not obligated to recompense us- Luke 17:10
5. So God owes nothing to any creature - Job 41:11; Rom. 11:35-36
6. So God has no needs - Ps. 50:8-15; Is. 40:19-20, 44:15-17

His own criterion

"Theologians have usually treated aseity as a metaphysical attribute, that is, one that focuses on the independence of God's being over against other beings. It seems to me, however, that the same basic concept is equally important in the epistemological and ethical areas. That is to say, God is not only self-existent, but also self-attesting and self-justifying. He not only exists without receiving existence from something else, but also gains his knowledge only from himself (his nature and his plan) and serves as his own criterion of truth. And his righteousness is self-justifying, based on the righteousness of his own nature and on his status as the ultimate criterion of rightness." (Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P & R Publishing. 2002. 602)

Heading for home!

I am finally nearing the end of a journey I started early on in 2009. I am less than 50 pages away from finishing John Frame's book The Doctrine of God. With 742 pages, not including the appendices, this was a colossus of a read. I do not expect to ever learn more theology from any other individual book (other than the Bible). I think that speaks to 2 things: my incredible lack of understanding when I started the book and the excellence of the book itself. It has been an amazing journey. I have blogged often from the pages of this book and I hope it has been somewhat helpful. I'm sure it is a book that I will use regularly as a resource and a reference.

At any rate, I will press on to the end of this trek. In discussing the divinity of the second member of the trinity, the Son, Frame presents examples of how, in the New Testament, the deity of Christ is taken for granted as opposed to positively asserted:

...Jesus in the Gospels never withdraws or modifies a statement, never apologizes or repents (though among human beings such is a mark of greatness), never seeks advice, and never asks for prayer for himself. He sometimes behaves strangely-sleeping in a boat during a storm(Matt. 8:24) and allowing Lazarus to die (John 11:37)-without explaining his actions. Such behavior can be considered virtuous only in God himself. Once again, these texts do not teach Jesus' deity; they presuppose it. (649)

What God Cannot Do and a Few Other Lists

From John Frame's The Doctrine of God:

Six kinds of actions that God cannot perform:

1. Logically contradictory actions - such as making a round square or ultimately saving and condemning the same person
2. Immoral actions - such as lying, stealing, or coveting
3. Actions only appropriate to finite creatures - like taking medicine for a cough
4. Actions denying His own nature as God - such as abandoning His own attributes
5. Changing His eternal plan - what has been decreed by God will happen
6. Making a stone so large He cannot lift it - falls under several categories above (1, 3, and 4)

Ways in which Scripture tells us God is unchanging:

1. In His Essential Attributes - Hebrews 10:1-12
2. In His Decretive Will - Psalm 33:11
3. In His Covenental Faithfulness - Psalm 89:34-37
4. In the Truth of His Revelation - Isaiah 46:8-10

Conclusions on God's Incorporeality:

1. God is not to be identified with any physical being, for he is transcendent over space and time.
2. If God is simple, it is hard to imagine how he can be physical.
3. If he is omnipresent he cannot be a particular physical being.
4. If God had a physical existence, his body would have to be the entire universe; this is pantheism.
5. Nor should we think of the world as part of God's being; this is panentheism.
6. Nevertheless, God is present in the world he has made.

Reconcilable "apparent contradictions"

The doctrines that are most often described as "apparently contradictory" are divine sovereignty and human freedom, the problem of evil, and the Trinity. Cornelius Van Til believed that these doctrines involve "apparent contradictions" that can never be reconciled by the human mind. However, I don't think Scripture tells us which apparent contradictions are reconcilable by men and which are not...Some apparent contradictions can be removed by careful study of God's Word. Others, perhaps, await future increases in our Bible knowledge, or even, perhaps, future developments in the science of logic itself. Others, perhaps, await the vastly increased knowledge of God (1 Cor. 13:1-12; 1 John 3:2) that we will gain when we meet him in glory. And some may be such that creaturely minds can never reconcile them.

If there are some apparent contradictions that we cannot reconcile (now, or in the future, or ever), we should try and hold both sides of the paradox, as best we can, and walk by faith. If divine sovereignty and human responsibility seem contradictory to us, we may and should, nevertheless, both continue to regard God as sovereign and acept responsibility for our thoughts and actions. And in this case, we should be careful not to adopt any apparently logical inferences from divine sovereignty that compromise human responsibility, or vice versa.

Our faith does not depend on our being able to reconcile all apparent contradictions. Rather, it rests on the solid foundation of God's revelation of himself-in creation, in Scripture, and in Christ. So we will walk by faith, rather than by sight. (Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P & R Publishing. 2002. 512)

As he is righteous, so he is logical

So God acts and thinks in accordance with the laws of logic. This does not mean that he is bound by these laws, as though they were something "above" him. The laws of logic and rationality are simply the attributes of his own nature. As he is righteous, so he is logical. To be logical is his natural desire and pleasure. Nor does he create the laws of logic, as if they were something he could change at will. Rather, they are necessary attributes, inalienable qualities of all his thinking and acting. (Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P & R Publishing. 2002. 511)

Hate as a divine attribute of God

This is interesting:

"God is love," then, implies that from eternity past, God has had an implacable hatred of evil. That hatred is not separable from his perfect nature. It is a necessary and defining attribute, not a merely accidental or relational one. "God hates evil" gives us a profound description of his character. "God is hate," however, is not a helpful way of making this point, since it creates terrible confusion. But once we specify the objects of God's hate, we can state clearly that it is a divine attribute. (Frame, John M. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P&R Publishing. 463)

Frame gets to this point because he recognizes that God cannot love goodness without hating evil. Frame suggests that to say "God loves goodness" is one side of a coin; the other side says "God hates evil". These are positive and negative ways of describing the same virtue. From the same page Frame explains: "In the mind of God before creation, evil existed only as an idea in his mind, only as a possibility. But surely God regarded that possibility with hostility."

Virtues least practised

"My perception is that gentleness and humility are among the virtues least practiced by Christians today. If God himself can serve his creatures, surely we, who can boast of nothing except the cross, should be able to serve without seeking constantly to maintain or improve our own status and reputation." (Frame, John M. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2002. 443)

Frame on common grace

I am part of a small group that just finished an evening focused on common grace. It was an excellent evening of learning. The discussion was interesting and edifying! I was going through a book that I have been reading for the better part of a year and came across this:

So all the blessings of God come to us by God's sovereign grace. Without his grace, we are nothing. By grace comes the forgiveness of our sins, the power to do good works, and the ability to serve the people of God. And all of these come from the most amazing grace of all: For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. (2 Cor. 8:9)...To my knowledge, Scripture never uses hen or charis to refer to his blessings on creation generally or on nonelect humanity. So it would perhaps be better to speak of God's common goodness, or common love, rather than his common grace. The word grace in Scripture tends to be more narrowly focused on redemption than goodness and love, although the latter terms also have rich redemptive associations. (Frame, John M. The Doctrine of God. New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2002. 429-430)

Is God's love coercive?

Photo from www.monergismbooks.com

In his book The Doctrine of God, John Frame addresses this question:

But the issue is most clearly focused in this question: Does God violate our free will in converting us? Yes and no. He makes us believe in him, something we resist apart from grace. In that sense, he forces us to believe against our will. But when we believe, surely, we are doing something we want to do, for God's grace also changes our wants. In that sense, we believe willingly. In conversion, then, God brings us to act contrary to our depraved will, and in accord with a new will given by grace. (424)

Frame on the blessings of the eternally reprobate

Frame, who clearly believes that people are either eternally elect or eternally reprobate, discusses God's goodness to the eternally reprobate in The Doctrine of God:

Therefore, human beings do not all receive the same blessings of God's goodness. Those who are eternally elect receive the fullness of eternal life. Those who are eternally reprobate receive blessings only in this life. Those blessings should not be disparaged. The nonelect experience the goodness of God in a profound way (Acts 14:17), sufficient to convince them of their need to repent (Rom. 2:4). They have no valid complaint that God has not been good to them. Indeed, God has givem them (as to all of us) many more blessings than they deserve. (412)

Frame goes on to discuss God's goodness to all in light of eternal punishment:

Certainly it is hard for us to think of eternal punishment as divine benevolence. A somewhat more satisfying answer to the question is that God is good to creatures in different ways and at different times, depending on their natures and their roles in God's plan for history. His goodness does not obligate him to give the same blessings to all, or to give the same blessings to any creature throughout his existence. If the lost in hell are now receiving no blessing at all, they cannot complain that God was never good to them. During this life, they were surrounded by God's goodness, just like all other creatures. Furthermore, as Scripture often represents it, the wicked typically prosper in this life and oppress the righteous. In the next life, these roles are reversed (Luke 16:19-31). So even the reprobate should confess that God has been good to them, far more than they deserve. (413)

Frame on God's Attributes

I continue to work through the 864 page work by John frame entitled The Doctrine of God. It has been an enlightening read on many topics and I have enjoyed the journey. Frame writes with clarity and precision and leaves flourish to other writers. I really enjoy his straightforward approach and find it helpful when tackling some of the more difficult subjects.

I am currently reading his chapters on God's attributes. Frame approaches the attributes of God from a different angle then some of the books I have read on the topic. I wanted to share some of his opening remarks. Frame writes:

In chapter 12, I argued that the defining or essential attributes of God should not be considered parts of him, but rather are perspectives on his whole being, that is, his essence. In that sense, God is "simple." He is also complex, but each attribute describes God's entire complexity, not just a part of it. So no attribute is separable from the others. Each attribute has all the attributes: God's love is eternal, just, and wise. His eternity is the eternal existence of a just and wise person. Nevertheless, each attribute presents God's essence from a different perspective, so that the collection of the gives some insight into the complexity of his being.

Does God's simplicity mean, then, that his eternity is the same as his love, or that his knowledge and justice are identical? The attributes do differ in perspective and emphasis,but they ultimately coalesce. Yes, God's eternity is the same as his love, for his eternity is the eternal existence of a loving person, and his love is the love of an eternal person. That is to say, eternity and love are not abstract qualities that characterize many beings including God, and that exist in him alongside many other abstract qualities. Rather, they are God himself. Our standard of love is not something in God, alongside other things, but God himself. And to find what eternity is, we should not search among abstract "eternal objects" like numbers and and the properties of creatures; rather, we should look to God himself.

Ultimately, then, the rather abstruse notion of divine simplicity, which identifies God's attributes as his essence, reduces to divine personalism. That is, God is a person, not a collection of abstract qualities. It is tempting to think pf God as a collection of abstract qualities when we consider the divine attributes, but we must keep reminding ourselves that God is a person, and that the divine attributes represent his powers and character traits. (388)