Wyatt Graham | Page 3 of 47 | Faith | Books

Can Christians Affirm Multiple Wills in God?

June 2, 2019 by wagraham Leave a Comment

Jesus prayed in the Garden, “not my will be done but yours,” and elsewhere he says, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.” Obviously, Christ has his own will, and the Father has his.

Nobody disagrees here. But the next step is crucial. Does Jesus mean that his divine will agrees with the Father’s divine will, or does Jesus mean that his human will concurs with the divine will of God?

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Can Christians Believe in the Eternal Submission of the Son? (a Review of Trinity Without Hierarchy Edited by Michael Bird and Scott Harrower)

June 1, 2019 by wagraham 1 Comment

For centuries, Christians have confessed that God exists as a tri-unity distinguished by the personal names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each name of a person in God expressed some implied relationship: so the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten.

These relational properties (often called relations of origin) maintained the unity of the simple God, while distinguishing persons in God according to their biblical names: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But recently, some evangelicals have attempted to reconceive of the Trinity by introducing notions of authority and submission into the inner-life of God. The basic idea goes like this: Jesus obeyed the Father during his earthly life. And this obedience implies an eternal relationship in which the Son of God always obeyed the Father. So authority and submission explain how persons in God relate to one another.

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Time Does not Exist (It Has no Substance)

May 30, 2019 by wagraham 3 Comments

Time measures movement. It describes one rotation of the earth on its axis with the sun as a fixed point and defines that movement as 24 hours. Time points to the earth rotating around the sun over 365 single rotations with respect to the sun and calls that one year. While the earth makes its rotating orbit around the sun, its tilt creates temperature shifts across the world, which we call seasons.

When our bodies grow matter and develop, we call this age. When our bodies atrophy and begin to shut down, we too call this age. We define our own age on the basis of the earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. One orbit of the earth around the sun, one year we gain.

Everything that has a beginning has motion. God created the earth, and so it began to spin and orbit a star we call the sun. The stars and celestial beings exist for the very sake of measuring motion: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years’” (Gen 1:14).

Time has no substance, or matter of its own. Like a measuring tape expands across a board and defines the board’s length by inches and feet, so do days and years measure the distance the earth moves.

We define inches and feet and metres and yards to describe lengths. We define minutes and hours and days and years and centuries and millennia to describe movements.

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How Paul Explains Christ’s Presence at The Lord’s Supper

May 29, 2019 by wagraham 3 Comments

Christians from across time and space have affirmed that Christ becomes present to us at the Lord’s Supper through which we receive spiritual nourishment. Yet while most Christians have affirmed this basic idea, the particulars of how Christ becomes present have proved divisive.

Views on the Supper

Reformed believers tend to say that Christ becomes present by the Spirit. Lutherans may affirm this but also claim that Christ truly and really appears bodily within the bread. Roman Catholics define presence as transubstantiation.

Some others simply affirm the mystery of the Supper without naming the exact relationship. Lastly, a common belief today among evangelicals is that the Supper functions to bring Christ’s past work and God’s grace to mind—it is a memorial in this sense.

If we return to the Biblical text, we can, I believe, gain a clearer grasp of the meaning of Christ’s presence at the Supper. In so doing, we will ground our theology in the Bible. One key place to look is Paul’s explanation of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 10.

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ERAS Cannot Distinguish The Spirit from the Son And Father

May 23, 2019 by wagraham 1 Comment

Christians speak of the Son as being “the only begotten Son” (John 3:16) from all time to give words to how they can confess the oneness of God and say: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Rev 5:13).

If God sired the Son from all time, then the Son’s filial relationship to the Father has always described their relationship. It was an eternal begetting or an eternal generation.

Recently a number of Christians have either denied eternal generation, supplanted it, or at the very least have redefined it. The new paradigm takes the name Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS).

At least two major obstacles stand before ERAS. First, how can one God eternally obey the one God? That implies two wills. But God is one and so has one will. So he cannot obey his own will.

Second, and what I want to focus on here, ERAS does not articulate how the Spirit can be distinguished from the Father and Son. In short, it cannot explain our worship or liturgical practice of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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How Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware Explain Eternal Relations of Submission and Authority in Their Own Words

May 22, 2019 by wagraham Leave a Comment

In heated debates, the key positions sometimes get lost in the fray. And since the complementarian Trinity debate has once more entered centre stage due to recent publications, we could use a spotlight to illumine the key theological issues.

For that reason, I want to clarify the eternal relations of authority-submission (ERAS) or eternal functional subordination (EFS) position on the Trinity.

This article aims to define ERAS sympathetically by outlining the views of Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware by citing their own words.