quote:

---

Originally posted by Lee Merrill

Hi POW!

quote:

---

Turns out that "wrath" is a bad translation that keeps being perpetuated.

---

Well, "thumos" can mean "passion" or "heat," but it does also mean "anger", and I think it means "anger" in Revelation, especially.

---

quote:

---

The early Latin translations of thymos was ardentio (ardent striving) and/or passio (passion). Later, in the middle ages after Anselm, iracundia (wrath, irate) and furor (anger) came into usage to interpret the Latin Bible's ardentio and passio christi. Protestants naively picked it up even despite the fact that a few of their Greek scholars pointed out it was wrong (bad theology drove scriptural mistranslation).

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by johnmd

Now in Calvin’s robotic world God intervenes, manipulates, orchestrates, determines and causes. Those are the rules of creation for Calvin’s God. However, genuine love and fellowship with God intuitive to man’s experience of love is not possible in this kind of world. That is the smoke screen of Calvin—A robotic world which makes a counterintuitive and nonsensical claim of love.

---

quote:

---

In his eloquent commentary on Romans 8:19-23, Calvin pictured every part of creation as engrossed in longing for a common wholeness not yet revealed. 61 "There is no element and no part of the world which, touched with the knowledge of its present misery, is not intent on the hope of the resurrection."

---

quote:

---

Although the purpose of this world theatre, as Calvin conceived it, was the evocation of praise, it was a praise nonetheless rooted in a deep sense of precariousness. Susan Schreiner points out that Calvin's conception of the world as theatre of God's glory is inseparably related to his understanding of the terrible effects of the Fall on the natural world. Reading passages like Psalm 104:5-9, Calvin perceived the cosmos as profoundly fragile, constantly on the verge of chaos as a result of human sin. Only God's immediate restraining hand is what holds back, at any moment, for example, the threat of the waters of oblivion. 28 A medieval cosmology underlay his thinking at this point, convincing him that water is an element inherently lighter than earth. The natural tendency of the world's oceans, therefore, is to overwhelm the land. Only the continual commandment of God is what preserves the existence of dry earth as a virtual miracle from one moment to the next. 29

There is no evidence that Calvin ever saw the sea, yet storms on Lake Geneva coming down from the Alps certainly stirred his anxious imagination about the instability of the natural order. He wrote of the ocean's "great surges and hideous waves," saying that, "nothing is more terrifying than a tempestuous sea," a horror "so frightening that one's hair stands up on one's head." 30 Thunderstorms similarly occasioned the sense of numinous awe that he knew to lie at the heart of all authentic religious experience. "We only praise God aright when we are filled and overwhelmed with an ecstatic admiration of the immensity of his power." 31

Anxiety and praise were intimately interconnected in Calvin's experience. Bouwsma speaks of him as "a singularly anxious man," viewing human existence as a perpetual crisis of anxious indecision, echoed even in the deep contingency of nature itself. 32 Throughout his life, Calvin searched for assurances of God's order in the fragile world around him. His mother had died when he was but four years old, his father quickly remarrying and shunting him off to a neighboring family where he received his earliest education. Exiled in later years from France, the home and country he most loved, he never felt fully at home in Geneva. Moreover, he and his wife lost in infancy all three of the children born to them. His own personal world, therefore, as well as the cosmos at large, remained ever uncertain. 33

---

quote:

---

The theatre of God's glory invites us beyond ourselves, at last, to an awe that intensifies at the wonder of species added to species. Multiplicity in creation contributes to the arithmetic of praise. "If we compare a hawk with the residue of the whole world, it is nothing," Calvin said. "And yet if so small a portion of God's works ought to ravish us and amaze us, what ought all his works do when we come to the full numbering of them?"(Sermon on Job 39:22-35, CO 35:432.) Ravishment, in the end, is God's purpose in bringing the whole world "to its feet" in ecstatic applause as the curtain falls on God's own passionate performance of desire. Smitten by longing, we stand at the end in speechless awe, madly clapping our hands in hope of another encore, determined--if we can help it--that the performance never end. We cannot imagine (much less even hope) that God in God's astounding love, is all the while a sucker for such longing, that God is just as eager to continue to perform as we are to enjoy. Held indefinitely in that strange and awesome embrace, in the joyous meeting of God's desire and our own, we and the whole world with us are sustained by praise.

---

quote:

---

John: A corrupt world where bombs explode is the nature of the case God is fighting to redeem. Rote intervention as you propose does not account for God’s stated purpose in creation which does not give God the option of intervening at every turn if genuine love and fellowship with man is to be accomplished in creation.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by feelinahole

POW: the strawman is real...and JohnMD is discussing the belief system predominantly. Get with the program, man!

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by feelinahole

...to be a Calvinist ... as a pure Calvinist ... plans everything ... predestined it because he wanted it.

---

quote:

---

Calvin's Theology of Nature: The Fragility of the World and the Necessity of Performative Praise

Although the purpose of this world theatre, as Calvin conceived it, was the evocation of praise, it was a praise nonetheless rooted in a deep sense of precariousness. Susan Schreiner points out that Calvin's conception of the world as theatre of God's glory is inseparably related to his understanding of the terrible effects of the Fall on the natural world. Reading passages like Psalm 104:5-9, Calvin perceived the cosmos as profoundly fragile, constantly on the verge of chaos as a result of human sin. Only God's immediate restraining hand is what holds back, at any moment, for example, the threat of the waters of oblivion

. . .

Calvin knew that all that keeps the world at large from falling apart in any instant is the intimate and immediate act of God's continual creation--an astounding performance unceasingly witnessed by the rest of creation and evoking its praise. He argued that, "Unless the Spirit of the Lord attracts everything [subtraho: "drawing it up from beneath"], it all lapses back into nothingness." 35 God sustains what God creates by the very act of taking delight in it. As Calvin put it, "The stability of the world depends on the rejoicing of God in his works."(Comm. Ps. 104:31. CO 32:97; CTS 11:170. ) The answer to anxiety, as he understood it, is found not only in the order that God establishes, but also in the desire that God expresses (and elicits from others). The latter makes possible the former. The world is a theatre of desire, where the display of God's own continual longing is met by the thunderous applause (and yearning) of creation itself. Humans, in turn, are meant to lead the rest of creation in praising the One for whom they all yearn yet know they cannot possess. Such, after all, is the nature of praise--a cry of ceaselessly unsatisfied longing, contributing to the very wholeness it seeks.

Calvin could even say, "If on earth such praise of God does not come to pass . . . then the whole order of nature will be thrown into confusion and creation will be annihilated." 36 The continuity of the earth rests on the capacity of the created world to participate in the perfect delight that God takes in all God has made. If God's creation of the universe is not consciously and deliberately celebrated, it remains radically at risk. From Calvin's perspective, then, what we would call ecological viability depends upon the exercise of praise. The world is sustained by worship.

---

quote:

---

While the maintenance of the world does not rest (as such) on the prayers of the faithful, God nonetheless solicits from God's creation a prayerful longing for interconnectedness that tends to engender its own reality.

---

quote:

---

The Genevan Reformer's sense of God's intimate relation to the natural world was so intense--he perceived God's radiant glory to pervade and uphold the world so completely--that in an extravagant stretch of language he could even declare the radical unity of nature and God.

. . . It can be said reverently, provided that it proceeds from a reverent mind, that nature is God; but because it is a harsh and improper saying, since nature is rather the order prescribed by God, it is harmful in such weighty matters, in which special devotion is due, to involve God confusedly in the inferior course of his works. 40

The world, for John Calvin, is permeated with God's Shekinah glory. Even though God's "unveiled essence" can never be discerned there, nature is nonetheless shot through with the energies of God's glory. 41

In thus connecting God so closely with the natural world, Calvin readily identified himself with a Stoic conception of nature, affirming (with his beloved Seneca) that God's providential hand could be observed everywhere in the universe. 42 By contrast, he repudiated an Epicurean view that sharply distanced nature from the divine. 43 Calvin claimed that

. . . to make God a momentary Creator, who once for all finished his work, would be cold and barren, and we must differ from profane men [the Epicureans] especially in that we see the presence of divine power shining as much in the continuing state of the universe as in its inception. (Institutes I.16.1.)

His theology (and spirituality) of nature took seriously the frailty of the world, but he found hope for the whole of creation in the sustained celebration of God's glory continuously pervading every single part of it.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by johnmd

John says
Well, as they say, "The acorn does not fall far from the tree.
Calvin's immediate successor embraced rabbid double predestination.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by johnmd

Regardless, even if Calvin was as you say. . .

---

quote:

---

Calvin spoke of the psalms as teaching him to "bear the cross" as well as to be "inflamed with desire." He found in the psalter "all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated." Preface to the Psalms Commentary, CO 31:15-16, CTS 8:xxxvii-xl.

---

quote:

---

The Metaphor of the Theatre in Calvin's Thought

Recent scholarship in Calvin Studies has emphasized that the sixteenth-century Genevan Reformer's theology was not so much governed, as traditionally thought, by an over-arching "system" centered on a unifying doctrine of (for example) predestination, as it was by "the constant reappearance of favorite images, metaphors, or figures of speech." 11 Formed by his training as a Renaissance humanist, Calvin's language was consistently more rhetorical than it was dialectical. The metaphor of the theatre, for instance, was one of his favorite ways of summarizing the sweeping epic of Christian salvation. "In the vast theater of heaven and earth," Ford Lewis Battles says of Calvin, "the divine playwright stages the ongoing drama of creation, alienation, return, and forgiveness for the teeming audience of humanity itself." 12 The theatre in which the drama unfolds is, in its broadest sense, the whole created world. There, through a display of astounding beauty, God summons all creation to take delight in common praise. More narrowly, however, the theatre of God's glory is the church, that particular company of players who most fully have grasped (and been grasped by) the drama enacted on the wider stage. They are the ones who apprehend worship as the audience's most appropriate response to God's dramatic performance.

In this way, the image of the theatre became an organizing metaphor in Calvin's thought, putting worship at the heart of his theology. 13 The human adoration of God, and its extension throughout the rest of creation, was, in fact, the stated purpose toward which Calvin originally directed his Institutes of the Christian Religion. His theological masterpiece might best be read as a summa pietatis rather than as a summa theologica. In the long subtitle of the first edition of the Institutes (1536), Calvin described his book as "encompassing almost the whole sum of piety [pietatis summam] and whatever it is necessary to know about the doctrine of salvation, a work most worthy to be read by all who are zealous for piety." (OS I:19) Doxology was for him the chief goal and delight of all created beings. He knew that theology remains unfinished until it concludes itself in spirituality.

---

quote:

---

"If ever there was a theologian who saw the universe sacramentally it was Calvin," writes Nicholas Wolterstorff. "For him, reality was drenched with sacrality. . . . Calvin's reforms meant a radical turn toward the world. But for him . . . the world to which one turns is a sacrament of God."

---

quote:

---

Remember the WAR motif was the Spirit's choosing to communicate to man the nature of the case of this world. That is just what Scripture says. There is no such thing in man’s experience as a war where battles are not lost.

---

quote:

---

A man with his head cut off for the sake of the gospel has just encountered a “real battle.” If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it looks like a war it is a war.

---

quote:

---

Calvin had the same problem that Job’s friends had in trying to find security in a perfect world of concrete order where God’s “will” is always done. They could not handle that evil could just happen. That ambushes could happen. That battles could be lost. Surely Job must have sinned. Surely Job brought this upon himself. And they were all sharply rebuked by the Almighty for their ridiculous theology that disallows arbitrary evil.

---

quote:

---

Your only other option is that man’s experience is a charade and the free will that you are accountable to God for is an illusion. This renders you a glorified puppet.

---

quote:

---

No one could have ever imagined that omnipotence would look like Calvary. He out smarted us all. The power of God to accomplish His purpose is in genuine love—Not the manmade notion of aristocratic dominion and “will.”

---

quote:

---

Sure God wants and hopes all will come to repentance and faith. Indeed, He does everything He can to bring this to pass. But hope is different from certainty.

---

quote:

---

Revelation tells us there will be many cast into the lake of fire. In doing this the Father destroys all dominion and authority and power of selfishness and evil to challenge the way of benevolence. That is my take on I Cor 15:24…Not that all men will be saved.

---

quote:

---

God did not even allow Satan to rebel. Couching the discussion in these sorts of terms (esp. “allow”) misses the point, begs the question, and is counterintuitive.

---

quote:

---

Is God being disingenuous when He tells us He is grieved for that which He caused.

---

quote:

---

From a comment to Spen: For a world of compatablistic robots is not the revelation of Scripture and does not achieve God's stated purpose of love.

---

quote:

---

FIH wrote: Again, whether or not God is "primary," or not,God not did not "allow" Joesph's brothers to sin.

---

quote:

---

POW: Doxology was for him the chief goal and delight of all created beings. [Calvin] knew that theology remains unfinished until it concludes itself in spirituality.

---

quote:

---

Lee: and which you have not prove!

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by PotOnWheel

John, a "body count" of an acting-Governor of a powerful city, sometimes carrying out capital punishement on crimes condemned by the Empire is COMPLETELY BESIDES THE POINT. Except to you.

You are not going to be worth trying to reason with.

---