The Spreadsheet

Link

To process this information, I made a spreadsheet where I have tried to analyze what is said and color-coded it. A word about how the spreadsheet is set up.

The first thing to be noticed is the type of a particular list. So there are, for example, list which come up from non-Christian Jewish authors, from manuscripts, individual authors, councils or documents (like a confession).
Then we have the author, which is either the person, the name of the manuscript or the name of the document.
Next up is the date of the list or if nothing specific is known about the list, the dates of its author.
Region mainly specifies whether a canon is Western or Eastern.
Claim to the Fathers/Authority is for those lists that mention that the list is received by a particular father or that “the Church” accepts or rejects some books.
In Comments are usually summaries of the list or an evaluation.

The division of the b...

A Review of Perspectives on the Doctrine of God

Simon Wartanian | 2,038 views | 2,894 words | 0:14:58 hours | 14 May 2022 21:35

This book sets to explore the doctrine of God, especially of His knowledge, immutability, and sovereignty from a Christian perspective. There are four positions, which could be sub-categorized as two Calvinist positions and two free will theism positions.

The classical Calvinist position

This book is a little...bittersweet. I am a Reformed Baptist and thus I agree with the classical position as articulated by Paul Helm, but I must agree with the criticism given by the other contributors that Helm’s chapter was more about predestination than about theology proper and God’s relation to the world. Helm’s claim that his position is the historical (whether true or false) was met with a lot of snarkiness and set an unprofessional tone to the book and responses, which was disappointing. Even as a Calvinist, I acknowledge that divine determinism or unconditional election is not the mainstream or default teaching of Christianity. I believe it is absolutely biblical, but it is something else to say that it is simply the default view. But were Dr. Helm’s chapter on classical theism and God’s relation to the world, then his statement would have fully been justified. The responses made even moderate statements by Dr. Helm to be absolute and extreme. This was unhelpful. Dr. Helm even spends a lot of pages preemptively responding to various views which he thought would be represented in this book. He even discusses middle knowledge and the views of William Lane Craig on that in his...

Extensive review of Jonathan Menn's Biblical Eschatology

Simon Wartanian | 5,473 views | 12,397 words | 1:05:40 hours | 09 February 2022 21:11

Review and summary of
Biblical Eschatology by Jonathan Menn

I’ve often seen this book in my Amazon Wishlist and asked myself, “Is it worth it? I don’t know the author, but it seems that he is amillennial.” My question was answered when I came across a YouTube series from ECLEA (Equipping Church Leaders East Africa), where Dr. Jonathan Menn is the director, entitled “Biblical Eschatology.” That series is based on a book also called Biblical Eschatology which ECLEA has published and which is available for free. Upon watching the series and skimming through the ECLEA book, I was impressed how thorough the author was and how widely read he was. Then I compared the table of contents of his larger book and the ECLEA book and came to the conclusion that they dealt with the same subjects, only that his book was much larger and thorough. That motivated it me all the more to get the larger book. The summaries of his book which are also available at ThirdMill also helped in my decision.

Now that introductions are out of the way, I think that this is one of the best books on eschatology from an amillennial viewpoint. My very favorite is probably Sam Storms’ Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative because it was the first book that I read after becoming an amillennial through a YouTube video. The High King of Heaven from Dean Davis is likewise a favorite of mine because it was thorough and dealt with many Old Testament prophecies and interpreting them through the lens of ...

The Early Church Fathers on Eschatology (especially the millennial question)

Simon Wartanian | 2,609 views | 207 words | 0:01:03 hours | 02 January 2022 14:56

This work is based on Dr. Charles E. Hill’s fine work entitled Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity. In it, he surveys eschatological thought in the first three centuries of the church. One focus of the study is the interesting observation of something common in all premillennialists (except one, Methodius of Olympus [c. 270-311]) that did not believe in the immediate entry of believers into heaven. Rather, believers and unbelievers were held in some subterranean place until the resurrection and the millennium. On the other hand, those who believed in an intermediate state in heaven, gave no indications of chiliasm (belief in an earthly millennium), but rather, some of them even give explicit evidence of non-chiliasm (i.e., amillennialism). What I’ve done here, is search for the fuller statements of the authors from the early church which are freely available in the Schaff sets on CCEL, and included citations of Dr. Hill from the book itself.

I thought of sharing it on the internet for anyone interested in these issues. In reading these statements, you will find both the good and the bad of the exegesis of the ancient fathers.

(For those not able to see the IFrame, here is the link.)

I published my commentary on the 1689 Confession of Faith

Simon Wartanian | 5,716 views | 523 words | 0:02:44 hours | 23 April 2021 17:00

I’m so excited to announce that I have published my commentary, which is freely available on this site, in paperback form! I’ve been working on it for quite some time. At first, I just wanted to have the content in book form. And then I began thinking that it may be beneficial for others to publish it on paper. I’ve also received questions from various people if I was planning on publishing it. After I was convinced to publish, I started searching for publishers. I’ve emailed many of them but received only one response and that particular publishing company wanted to publish the book in 8 volumes. I didn’t even want 2 volumes, but I couldn’t go over the 700 page limit of the company I first printed my book with. From then, the book was split into 2 volumes, but 8 volumes of ~ 200 pages each was absolutely out of the question. I was discouraged and abandoned the project for a while until I started looking into Amazon and publishing. Seeing that it is independent, it was much easier to manage than with a publishing company, so I started working to publish it with Amazon and the two volumes have finally been published now!

The majority of the content is the same as you will find on this website, but with corrected grammar (I hope) and some expanded sections on eschatology, the person of Christ, the Trinity among others.

The title is a mouthful but I believe accurate: A Layman’s Systematic and Biblical Exposition of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. I’m not a ...

Koine Greek Verb Parsing Flowchart

Simon Wartanian | 4,395 views | 87 words | 0:00:27 hours | 08 October 2020 20:50

In the past few months, I’ve been pushing myself to continue my study of Greek which I began in 2013, having finished the section on verbs in Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek, I started looking for flowcharts to help me with parsing. I came across one on which I based mine.

I pray that it is helpful to you.

Edit: There was a mistake that I corrected concerning the 2 Aorist. The tense formative σα goes with passive voice instead of the active/middle.

PDF PNG SVG Visio

Benjamin Keach's Gold Refined, or Baptism in its Primitive Puirty (1689) transcribed and formatted

Simon Wartanian | 3,387 views | 169 words | 0:00:52 hours | 10 February 2020 19:55

I’ve found myself lately to be diving into the subject of baptism again and especially searching old resources. Some great books were transcribed and available at Reformed Baptist Disk, but many more are not yet transcribed or properly formatted. But there are a lot of works which are available in scanned form (especially on Google Books) and image-to-text form on Early English Books. I first came across these sites and resources thanks to Samuel Renihan’s blog post. Tip: use the Wayback Machine to access some (currently) dead links. I’ve also formatted Isaac Backus’ A Short Description of the Difference between the Bond-Woman and the Free, but it still needs a proof read. But I will post it here soon, Lord willing. But for now:

Benjamin Keach – Gold Refin’d, or Baptism in its Primitive Purity (1689)

See the book here.

If you find any mistakes and would like to report them, then feel free to respond back to this message or message me at admin@thecalvinist.net.

Quotes from A. W. Pink's The Divine Covenants

Simon Wartanian | 5,054 views | 780 words | 0:04:06 hours | 16 June 2017 22:13

This is my organized citations from A. W. Pink’s The Divine Covenants. The whole book is available online and that is how I collected these citations and corrected some typos and other minor errors.

It has been argued by Brandon Adams that the major theses of Pink was consistent with 1689 Federalism, which teaches that only the New Covenant is the Covenant of Grace. All the other OT covenants were not “administrations” of the Covenant of Grace. You will not find in this work the model of “one covenant, multiple administrations” that is associated with Westminster Federalism. Rather, you will find that all of the OT covenants “adumbrated” the “everlasting covenant of grace”, were subservient to the divine purpose of mercy and grace and contained gracious promises.

There are some statements which could be interpreted in favor of Westminster Federalism, which I have also included under the heading “Westminster Sounding Statements”. But in reading these we must keep in mind the main theses of the work and how Pink uses certain words, for example, “administration.” I do believe that a fair interpretation can be given to these statements without doing violence to the meaning of Pink, but I’ll leave that task to the interested reader.

One difficult statement for me to interpret has to do with the idea of “renewal.” For example:

Just as the various Messianic prophecies, given by God at different times and at wide intervals, were suited to the local occasions when the...

John Owen's Case For Particular Atonement

Simon Wartanian | 13,088 views | 15,628 words | 1:22:53 hours | 21 March 2017 23:01

John Owen’s Case for Particular Atonement

(This post was originally written for a section in chapter 8 of the 1689 Baptist Confession.)

Introduction

Dr. John Owen’s work titled “The Death of Death in the Death of Christ” is, by the admission of many Calvinists, the most extensive work on the doctrine of Limited Atonement, or better named, Particular/Definite or Atonement/Redemption. Therefore, it is beneficial for us to take a brief look at his case for Particular Atonement over against Universal Atonement. Dr. Owen is aware and acquainted with the material of the opposing position and he interacts with them and answers their objections. He is not writing against caricatures of the opposing side but has researched the materials and arguments of the opposing side and, in my opinion, utterly refutes their arguments.

Almost everyone who has any reasonable knowledge of the debates concerning limited or unlimited atonement must have heard of Owen’s trilemma, which we have presented above. The trilemma is really forceful, but it is merely one argument out many more from Dr. Owen’s arsenal. The trilemma is not his only argument for Particular Redemption. But it may be an accurate summary of his case. He argues each of his points biblically. For a good summary of his arguments see here.

Dr. Owen’s book is divided into four books and various chapters dealing with the issues related to the atonement.

Book 1 (8 chapters) deals with the purpose of the Trinit...

A Review of Hell Under Fire

Simon Wartanian | 5,588 views | 1,399 words | 0:07:19 hours | 22 January 2017 20:36

Hell Under Fire:

Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment

By Christopher W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson

Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment. Ed. by Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004).

Had this book sitting on my shelf for a while and thought that it would merely be an academic book and a dry read. I couldn't be more wrong. Surely it was academic, but never on a level that made it impossible for an average Bible student to understand.

The Book and Its Content

The authors are top-notch theologians in our day who in this book respond to Annihilationism and Universalism, while at the same time give a biblical and holistic picture of hell. The subject of hell is sobering and terrifying. As believers we know that thanks to Christ we have been saved from this awful fate, which we should recognize--we rightly deserve. We likewise believe that all those without the Gospel of Christ, do not have a hope, are under the wrath of God and will everlastingly be under the wrath of God. It is terrifying to think of that and we cannot, without sympathy, discard the emotional appeal of Universalists and Annihilationists. The Bible is the sole infallible and highest authority for the Christian and if the Bible teaches that historical view of hell, then my emotions do not matter and cannot settle the truth about hell. It is as simple as that.

This book contains 10 chapters dealing, containing am...

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The Spreadsheet

The classical Calvinist position

Introduction

The Book and Its Content