How “Nous” Became a Trojan Horse For Secularism, and Why it is So Difficult to Translate

Anyone who has been involved in Orthodoxy in America will likely have seen much discourse (often polemical in nature) about the “nous.” In fact, the nous plays a pivotal role in anti-western polemics since it has become a trope that “the West doesn’t have a concept of the nous.” Accordingly, the nous functions as a type of secret thing you can only…

Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 5): A Deformed Christology

By Robin Phillips A Deformed Christology About the same time that my wife and I started to question Monergism, we began to be interested in the early ecumenical councils of the church. We were fascinated to learn that the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680-681) had provided a framework for understanding the relationship between the human and the divine when it rejected the heresies…

Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 4): The Heresy of Monergism

By Robin Phillips The Heresy of Monergism If all Calvinism were to be encapsulated by a single term it would be the word Monergism. The term comes from the Greek mono meaning “one,” and erg meaning “work,” and describes the notion that salvation is affected by only one agent, namely God. As R.C. Sproul explains it, “A monergistic work is a work…

Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 3): Calvinism Dislocates God From our Experience of Him

Calvinism Dislocates God From our Experience of Him By Robin Phillips We have seen in Part 2 of this series that Calvinism essentially asserts that God has two sides of His character, a side that delights to show mercy and a side that delights to punish sin. Both these sides must be expressed. By redeeming the elect, God’s love and mercy are…

Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 2): Calvinism Destroys God’s Justice

By Robin Phillips Calvinism Destroys God’s Justice “May the Lord curse you and abandon you. May the Lord keep you in darkness and give you only judgment without grace. May the Lord turn his back upon you and remove his peace from you forever.” These words, taken from a popular R.C. Sproul video, starkly reveal the dark underbelly of the Calvinist’s concept…

Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 1): Calvinism presents a dehistoricized Bible

By Robin Phillips Introduction My wife and I used to be Calvinists (or ‘reformed’ as we liked to say), and we wanted our children to grow the same. We attended a Calvinist church and taught reformed theology to our children. Beginning in 2012, however, we began to grow increasingly uncomfortable with the primary doctrinal tenets of this perspective. We still have respect…

Gay Marriage and Eastern Orthodoxy

The historical and cultural context of the Eastern Orthodox Church has meant that She has not had to grapple with many of the same questions as Christians in the West. The instability of the West following the barbarian invasions, together with the role that the papacy played in bringing some measure of religious and political stability following the fall of the Western…

The Ecumenical Early Church: A Reply to Pastor Wedgeworth

Steven Wedgeworth operates the Wedgewords blog and is the Founder of The Calvinist International website. Last week he wrote a thought-provoking article for the Calvinist International website titled “The Myth of the Ecumenical Early Church.” This summer I plan to interact with Wedgeworth’s article in my columns at The Colson Center. However, before doing that I thought it would be helpful to…