Douglas Blount, inspired me with a "broader, more comprehensive vision of the apologist's task."1 Through his invaluable feedback (including hundreds of comments on initial chapter selections) he pushed me to think and write more clearly. Michael Haykin, Stephen Yuille, and Tom Nettles opened up to me the wealth of spiritual resources we have in previous theologians, including the Patristics, the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards. He gave me the valuable gift of listening, thinking, and giving feedback—all of which was helpful, some of which kept me from making mistakes.
The Hanover Baptist Church offered me the opportunity to serve as an assistant pastor during the writing phase of my dissertation. Thirty years ago, at the cost of her blood, sweat, and tears, my long-suffering mother gave me the basic skills for completing this dissertation: she taught me to read and write. My childhood memory of my father reading the Bible to my siblings and me formed my love and respect for God's Word.
In this life I will never know all the sacrifices Christa made for me to complete this degree. And even if she had been, she loves me too much to tell me the sum.
INTRODUCTION
My central argument is that the doctrine of the imago Dei reinforces Pascal's abductive anthropological argument. The question I am trying to answer is this: how can the doctrine of the imago Dei. I argue that the doctrine of the imago Dei belongs to the explanatory stage of the anthropological argument.
This thesis argues that the doctrine of the imago Dei actually strengthens the anthropological argument. In the next chapter I will argue for a particular account of the doctrine of the imago Dei. As argued in Chapter 4, a similar duality is evident in the doctrine of the imago Dei.
The solution to this satanic delusion is found in the doctrine of the imago Dei. To this theme, the doctrine of the imago Dei adds details that strengthen the interpretation. So if there are Christian lives, the doctrine of the imago Dei strengthens the anthropological argument.
Whereas 2 Corinthians 3-5 presents the believer’s transformation into the image of Christ as a fact of their experience, Romans 8 portrays Christiformity in
Christ, resulting in the paradoxical experiences Paul goes on to describe: "afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing Jesus death in the body so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies Even the "day by day" renewal of the "inner" is contrasted with the reality that "our outer self is wasting away" (4:16) .24. Since men had rebelled against God and corrupted themselves and thereby their ability to function as God's sons and daughters, image-bearers and vice-regents, Christ came to make vicarious atonement for their sin and provide them with his righteousness— i.e., his flawless compliance with God's requirements, which every other man had failed to do.29 Although Christ's role in redemption is now complete, the sanctifying work of the Spirit is still in progress, for saints are still sinners. 29John Gill, An Exposition of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, The Newport Commentary Series (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press.
The Holy Spirit, Paul teaches, works to assure believers of their present status as children of God and, by implication, of their ultimate conformity to the image of Christ: "You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, with through whom we cry' Abba. Father!' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs” (Rom. However, this promise of the Spirit echoes in the hearts of saints who are also sinners living in a fallen world.
While believers can enjoy the assurance of the Holy Spirit, which is sufficient to "help us in our weakness," this assurance does not eliminate their need to "hope for what we do not see" and "wait for patience" (Romans 8:25). Consistent with this description of glorification, Murray describes it as "the complete and final redemption of the whole person when in integrity of body and soul the people of God shall be conformed to the image of the risen, exalted, and glorified Redeemer, when their own body. Schreiner, The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic F.
For Calvin, the “groaning” of creation emphasizes the value of the believers' foreseen state: “There is no element and no part of the world,” he writes, “which, touched by the knowledge of its present misery, does not exist. directed to the hope of resurrection. From this also we see how great is the price of eternal glory, which can impress and attract all to desire it," Calvin, Paul's Letters to the Romans and Thessalonians, 172. They do not hear the testimony of the Spirit to tell them that they are sons of God and daughters.
"Moaning" about Christlikeness flows only from the lips of believers - tenants of the overlapping domain between the fall and full Christianity. They "struggle always and yet come out."33 The Spirit remains as an ever-present witness to their glorious destiny (8:23).34 Therefore, they can be sure that the discordant notes of life will be resolved in the hymn. of God's loving purposes (8:28).35 Furthermore, God has carved the Christianity of every believer in his granite. The closing of this chapter, in fact, swells with Paul's belief that the bond of God's love for his children can never be broken: "I am confident," declares Paul, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
S. Lewis
If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit,” he recalls, “I answer that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”91 His first published work, The Spirits of Captivity, advances the theme “that nature is malevolent and that any God that exists is outside the cosmic system.”92 For Lewis, belief in God belonged in the same package as other absurd ideas (“Why—hell—it's medieval,” I cried.) . 93 However, Lewis was not simply a victim in the dissolution of his faith. What mattered most, he recalled, was my deep hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. During his days at Oxford he was attracted by the excitement of religious talk about the "Absolute." Perhaps, in Pauline terms, it was "exchanging the truth about God for a lie," reveling in the fantasy of a detached, non-intervening god.
Lewis's own description of the moment of his conversion to "Theism, pure and simple," can at first blush be disappointingly thin.108 "In the Trinity Term of 1929," he writes, "I gave in and admitted that God was God.”109 But the process that led to it reveals that this recognition was radical. Shortly after conversion, he struggled to accept some areas of the Christian faith: "He still had doubts," writes his biographer, "and still found the Gospels and most church services unattractive."114 Demons of doubt, Lewis especially after the death of his wife. What reason do we have, other than our own desperate wishes," he asks, "to believe that God, by any standard we can think of, is 'good.'
Doesn't all the prima facie evidence point to the exact opposite?”117 “A terrible thing,” he worried. Lewis," says he, "the writer of so much that is so clear and so true, the thinker whose keenness of mind and clearness of expression have enabled us to understand so much, that strong and resolute Christian, he too fell headlong into the vortex of. From my childhood," he recalls, "my mind was full of objections to the doctrine of God's sovereignty in choosing whom He wills to eternal life; and rejected whom he would; he left them forever to perish and be forever.
I know not how else to express [it],” he admits, “than by a calm, sweet abstraction of the soul from all the cares of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision or fixed ideas and imagination. It seems to me," he confides in his diary, "that I have fallen from my former sense of the pleasantness of religion."145 Later he writes: "This. Faithful to the portrait of the bearer of the Christian image, Edwards pours out his longing for the likeness of Christ: Christ's "blood and atonement," he writes, "have proved sweet, and his righteousness sweet; which was always accompanied by fervor of spirit; and inward struggles and breathings and groans that cannot be uttered, to be emptied of myself and swallowed up in Christ.”150.
If you want people to have faith and belief in God," he thinks, "you have to act authentically yourself."151 Frankl was not a Christian apologist, but his conclusion is clear. Denials and doubts about God and his character must flee from "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor 4:6). Christianity speaks directly to the human heart.1 For "the heart," he insists, "has reasons of its own, of which reason knows nothing" (L423/S680).
