Re-envisioning Reformed Dogmatics

Why is God's existence not more obvious? Why does he seem hidden? This is commonly known as the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. In What Can be Known about God is Plain, Tyler Taber seeks to elucidate these questions from a Christian perspective. Drawing from the work of noted Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Taber addresses the Problem of Divine Hiddenness with theological acumen as well as with resources from the Reformed tradition. Taber argues that the problem has an answer when these questions are analyzed in conjunction with Plantinga's epistemology and alongside certain Reformed doctrines (for instance, the doctrines of general revelation, sin's noetic effects, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, and so forth).

Soteriology, not epistemology, is the best entrance to theological hermeneutics and to the doctrine of Scripture. The triune God uses Scripture to make the community of believers live in Christ. We hear the words of Scripture in the light of Easter and Pentecost. We understand Scripture from faith in Christ and with the mind of Christ. At the same time, we come to know Christ in Scripture and we receive the mind of Christ by reading Scripture. We remain in Christ by remaining in the Word. Understanding Scripture and Christlikeness mutually reinforce each other. Living a Christian life with God and our neighbor in God's world will deepen our understanding of Scripture. This book explores the complex relationships between Jesus Christ, participation in Christ, theological hermeneutics, and the doctrine of Scripture. It shows the necessity of a holistic approach of life, knowledge, understanding, and renewal.

Huldrych Zwingli had an idea. To the shock of both Rome and fellow Protestant Martin Luther, he argued that Christ is not physically present in the Lord's Supper. Rather, the Eucharistic elements only represent Christ's body and blood. However, the unique basis undergirding his theory is often overlooked, both by his contemporaries and later commentators. He specifically understood the Lord's Supper to be patterned after the Passover meal, the meal of the Old Testament. His memorialist understanding was in fact based on the memorialist nature of the Passover. By bringing in Jewish scriptures to bear on our understanding of the Lord's Supper, his approach unlocks new questions that do not necessarily presuppose Greek metaphysics or a break from traditions. This work seeks to continue to develop the method Zwingli left behind, delineating a Eucharistic theology for the church today, one that gives careful consideration to God's actions in relation to Israel and therefore sees the meal not metaphysically, but historically and relationally.

The ascension is a crucial doctrine, integrally related to the incarnation. When it is underemphasized, it results in an impoverishment of our theology of Christ, the church, human beings, and eschatology. T. F. Torrance's theology offers a compelling vision and holistic doctrine of the ascension that, notwithstanding its flaws, deserves a careful and detailed examination. Torrance develops a holistic account of the ascension by considering the ontology, spatiality, and present ministry of the ascended Jesus. What results is a theological construction that affirms the ascended body of Christ and understands the Lord to be currently serving as our human representative in a ministry of priestly intercession, prophetic declaration, and ascended kingship. Torrance is able to do this without succumbing to literalism (space travel), demythologization (metaphorical reading), or Pelagianism (human effort-based sanctification and glorification). This book interprets and then develops Torrance's theology of the ascension in critical dialogue with contemporary theological interlocutors.

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement (MGT) was arguably the most contextualized doctrine of atonement in the history of the Protestant tradition. Hewn from the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and engineered to address the theological, political, philosophical, moral, and even economic milieu in the early republic, MGT became the doctrinal centerpiece of "the first indigenous American school of Calvinism." As a result, it stands as a kind of theological time capsule to the people and principles that shaped the tumultuous period between the first Great Awakening and the Civil War when it flourished in America. For over a century in the Anglo-American world, the doctrine of atonement was under heavy construction in the broader Reformed community. By endowing new meaning to old theological terms like imputation, substitution, justice, punishment, and even atonement, MGT represents a theological watermark of sorts in Reformed dogmatics, defining its limits, testing its boundaries, and demanding a level of precision from today's theologians. This book offers a contextualization, distillation, and conversation with this Edwardsean doctrine of atonement.