Journal of Reformed Theology最新文献

If the content of theology should align with the method of doing theology, then carefully ensuring consistency between prolegomena and the content of dogmatics is essential for the theological task. Yet for many evangelical theologians, scarcity of prolegomenal considerations has led to systemic problems. Here I investigate how the doctrine of the image of God impinges upon our understanding of the nature of theological language, in order to expose a deep yet tacit inconsistency operative within recent evangelical accounts that affirm the univocity of theological predication. In contrast to these works, my claim is that a robust commitment to a comprehensive doctrine of the imago Dei entails an analogical view of human predications about God. In this regard, works in evangelical systematics that simultaneously affirm univocity and a robust doctrine of imago Dei have not sufficiently synthesized the content of their theology with their theological methodology.

Jonathan Edwards’s idealism did not seem to leave any place for material things or acts beyond mere ideas and perceptions. So, why was he so serious and faithful in his role as a preacher if the act of preaching in the material world did not have any existence beyond perception? This essay suggests that the preaching of the Word had a significant place in Edwards’s idealism because of his reconception of the theologies of sin, faith, and preaching in new metaphysical and relational terms that allowed him to place such theologies in his idealism.

Contemporary systematic theology is engaged in the ‘retrieval’ of insights from the Christian tradition. Accordingly, many theologians in the broadly Reformed tradition are seeking to recover, reclaim, and defend what they refer to as ‘classical theism’ as a stark alternative to what is sometimes referred to as ‘theistic personalism’ (and the ‘Social Trinitarianism’ that is said to accompany it). While broadly sympathetic to this enterprise, in this essay I employ the theology of Charles Hodge as a case study to argue that such tidy categorizations can be misleading and unhelpful, and I conclude that his theology raises challenges with respect to both historiography and theology.

This article demonstrates analytic theology’s contribution to missiology by turning to T.F. Torrance’s theology of mission as a test case. Upon examining Torrance’s missiological contribution, it becomes apparent that his notion of the end of mission—the personalization of humanity—is conceptually fuzzy. I demonstrate how analytic theology can clarify, and further develop, this aspect of Torrance’s missiology, and thus conclude that if analytic theology can help to bring clarity to the missiological proposals of one missional theologian, then perhaps analytic theology might lay claim to the possibility of playing a greater role within the discipline of missiology.

This article examines the typological patterns that distinguish Jerome Zanchi’s exposition of human creation in his De Operibus Dei intra spatium sex dierum creatis (1591). It argues that Zanchi’s distinctive application of the principle that Christ is the “scope” and “substance” of scripture to the exegesis of the relevant texts in Genesis 1–2 is tied to a conviction that Christ’s mediatorial headship over the church embraces a continuity of operations between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. Because of this he believes that the prelapsarian type, or figurative sign, can participate in the antitype, or the spiritual reality the type signifies, without eliding the critical distinction between them, as illustrated in his articulation of the “image of God.”

Since the concept of synchronic contingency has received attention in historical theology in recent decades, I want to argue in this article that the concept has value for systematic theology as well. I explore the broader consistency of the concept with Reformed theology by relating it to a number of Reformed doctrines, and I check its consistency with Reformed theology by discussing the relevant criticisms and questions raised by Paul Helm.