Dead-Ends and New Directions

The aim of this article is to investigate how Abraham Kuyper and some late neo-Calvinists have addressed the doctrine of creation in light of the challenges posed by evolutionary scientific theory. I argue that most neo-Calvinists today, particularly scholars from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), continue Kuyper’s legacy by holding the core principles of a creationist worldview. Yet, they have taken a new direction by explaining the natural history of the earth in evolutionary terms. In my analysis, Kuyper’s heirs at the VU today offer judicious parameters to guide Christians in conversation with evolutionary science, precisely because of their high appreciation of good science and awareness of the nonnegotiable elements that make up the orthodox Christian narrative.

Further Reforming a Reformed Theology of Law

Early Reformed theology of law was very similar to Thomas Aquinas’s, although it also dissented from aspects of his work. This early Reformed thinking about law came to influential expression in the Marrow of Modern Divinity. The Marrow’s theology of law focused on concerns of Reformed soteriology while continuing to resemble much of Thomas’s scheme. This revised Reformed approach was generally helpful, yet did not give enough attention to the movement of redemptive history. Therefore, this article proposes a theology of law that incorporates earlier Reformed developments but also seeks to reform them further by taking redemptive-historical considerations into fuller account.

Salvation and Victory by Christ’s Death and Resurrection in the Ancient Church

The theme of this article arises from Reformed theology, namely, how did authoritative Christian authors of the second to the fifth centuries AD think about salvation by Christ’s substitutionary and atoning death? How do their views relate to the ‘Christus Victor’ theology that is sometimes propagated nowadays as a more biblical alternative to the traditional Reformed soteriology, and which is considered the dominant approach in the ancient church? Can traces of Christ giving ‘satisfaction’ for God’s offended honor or for his wrath against sin be found in the first centuries? Did any church fathers hold that Christ vicariously bore God’s punishment for the sins of humankind? What was meant by the ransom that Christ had to pay, and to whom did he pay it: to God or to the devil, or were these considered invidious alternatives? This article demonstrates that in their interpretations of biblical texts, the church fathers did indeed address most of these questions. However, a continuous debate on such questions remained, so that the church of those centuries did not create a standard doctrine about the rationale of salvation by Christ, which testifies to varied understandings of it.