The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Lordship Salvation

(Fred) I think what John means to say is that it gripped him as being totally undeniable. It is again being inaccurate to say that it was an illumination to him for the very first time when he was preaching through Matthew. I can ask him for you to make sure, at least run it by Phil Johnson, but I think it is a tad misleading to say he had never believed this before. My undestanding, and this comes from people who have known John when he was still in high school, is that he always held to LS, but was under no compulsion to defend it until he was challenged. Calvin was the same way with predestination. He had always believed the biblical view of predestination that would eventually bare his name, but he only began to comment upon it in the later editions of his institutes after Pighius made it an issue.


(Fred) This is a different issue all together, but John never denied the ontological trinity. Even when the less sophisticated fundies in the IFCA mistakenly made this an issue so that John was brought up on "heresy" charges and had to face an IFCA inquisition, he had never denied the trinity. For John, the sonship debate centered around the incarnational language. Christ had always been the second member of the trinity, however, John argued that he took on the unique role of the son at his incarnation. Granted, he has changed his position on this, but it is once again misleading to say that John was denying the eternal son in the sense of denying the second member of the trinity.

Fred