Monday Quote of the Week

"The Socinians wanted to get rid of all philosophical language in Christian theology. They wanted to just go back to the bare texts of Scripture. The result was a theology that was (surprise, surprise) Unitarian. Guess what? If you get rid of all the Greek philosophical vocabulary in Christian theology, you cannot express God’s threeness-in-oneness in anything approximating a coherent way. You simply can’t do it. And historically it’s the case that whenever people have tried to purge Christianity of what we would call metaphysical language, philosophical language, it always ends up in Unitarianism.

- Dr Carl R Trueman (a member of the Free Church of Scotland and Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia) - quote taken from Immoderate blog.

Monday Quote of the Week

Charles Darwin was much more balanced and less-biased than the evolution fundamentalists of today...

"... The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, (must) be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."

- Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species (Reprint of the first edition) Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, New York, 1979, p. 292

Monday Quote of the Week

Origen (3rd-century "Church Father") wrote regarding John 1:1:

We next notice John's use of the article in these sentences... He uses the article when the name of God refers to the uncreated cause of all things, and omits it when the Logos is named God...as the God who is over all is God with the article, not without it.
God on the one hand is Very God (Auththeos, God of Himself); and so the Savior says in His prayer to the Father [John 17:3], "That they may know the only true God"; but that all beyond the Very God is made God by participation in His divinity, and is not to be called simply God (with the article) but rather God (without article).

Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 9, p. 323