Thursday, January 24, 2008

Book Recommodation... and a step back

I have just finished reading a very interesting book written by Dr. C Matthew McMahon, which is incidentally his doctoral thesis. The book is entitled The Two Wills of God — Does God really have two wills?, and it is a dissertation on the lofty and sacred topic of the will of God. More specifically, it addresses the topic of "common grace", the "well-meant or free offer", the will of God towards the elect and the reprobate, and of course the proclamation of the Gospel. This is done through proving the biblical position from the Scriptures, and then showing from the writings of the Reformers and the Puritans, as well as the major creeds and confessions of the Chuch, that this is what the Church and the giants in Church history also believes, though of course there is no total unaminity on all points under contention, but by and large they reject the relatively modern novelty introduced by people such as John Murray and Ted Stonehouse.

After reading the book, I can say that I would highly recommand it, if you are interested in the topic of course, which I am after having interacted with the common gracers.

That said, I would like to take a step back. I would suppose that probably some people who may attempt to read the posts on this topic may be confused, as I have presupposed a lot of rather complex doctrines when discussing this issue. So for those who may want to know more, I have presupposed the Doctrines of Grace aka Calvinism, the immutability of God, the omniscience and sovereignty of God, assymetrical double predestination, the Covenant of Redemption, that God works everything out for His own glory, that the difference between God and man is not by way of analogy but of degree, and thus logic epistemologically applies to God and His decrees too (though logic ontologically depends on God).

As it could thus be seen through my posts on the topic so far, my starting point is the glory of God, not the love of God. As to why such is the case, the short answer is that the glory of God is the magnification of His person in ALL His attributes, while focusing on the love of God may cause us to pit this against His other attributes and unbalance the emphasis placed on His various attributes. This is especially the case since it is very human to import our human notions of what love is, even sub-consciously, and impose it on God.

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