Tuesday, March 15, 2005

*Sigh*

After this, I thought that people might have realized the error of their ways. Rather than substantively interacting with the problems I raised, they have decided to continue propagandizing (see the comments section here). Apparently, that takes less time away from a dissertation than actually thinking through one's arguments. Since there's nothing new raised here, I'll leave the demonstration of the errors as an exercise for the reader. I'm sure there's probably more that I could criticize, but these seem to capture the problem pretty well.

Josh S says:
Chemnitz clears away the whole mess in one gesture by saying that the natures are united to each other, and that the Person is composed of this union, rather than the Person being a third thing to which the natures are joined.

Eric Phillips says:
We do not teach that the divine makes the humanity unlimited, or that the human makes the divinity limited. We teach that the One Person of the God-Man, at any given time, in any given way, could and can act according either to the strength of His divine nature, or the weakness of His human nature.

That is to say, we teach what the Council of Chalcedon says.

The most entertaining part was Phillips' reflection on his benighted days as a Baptist:
Studying the Church Fathers had perplexed me previously, because they all seemed to believe in baptismal regeneration. How could they all have been wrong about that? I wondered.

It's funny to look back on that question now.

Not half as funny as thinking that Lutheran theology is compatible with the patristic understanding of baptismal regeneration or the Council of Chalcedon.

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