Mostrando resultados por autor "Guillermo Santamaria" en Todas las categorías

If we read the Old School/New School Presbyterian controversy the way a historian reads a fracture line in rock, the key point is this: it wasn’t a single doctrinal dispute, but a whole system—a package deal—about what Christianity is, how grace works, and who gets to steer the church. Your summary file already captures that “bundle” structure well: doctrine, revival method, polity, and institutional power all moving together. On the Old School side (Princeton-centered figures like Hodge, Alexander, Miller, and the more combative Breckinridge/Junkin wing), the animating fear was ...

Acts 17 is presented as Luke’s “stress-test” chapter for the gospel: Paul reasons from Scripture in Thessalonica, is vetted by Berean Scripture-testing, and then collides with pagan intellectual culture in Athens. That blend explains why the chapter repeatedly becomes a battleground for apologetics, natural theology, contextualization, repentance, judgment, and resurrection. The interpretive history is traced along recurring fault lines: whether Paul’s Creator/providence argument is “natural theology” or a prosecutorial indictment of idolatry; whether the “unknown god” altar...

The book portrays American tract culture (c. 1790–1900) as a mass-publishing and distribution system—a “Benevolent Empire” infrastructure that tried to scale Protestant influence via short printed literature, agents, and societies. The central claim isn’t merely that tracts existed, but that tract-society machinery functioned like a parallel church-system: boards, officers, constitutions, fundraising, annual reports, and colporteurs doing “religious work” outside local-church authority. A key hinge is the “no-sectarian” rule (especially with the American Tract Society): ...

The book Conflicts Among the Tentacles of the Monster is a compact sociology-of-reform case study: it argues that the antebellum “benevolent empire” (Bible, tract, missions, temperance, abolition, education, etc.) projected a saintly public face while internally generating predictable power-struggles—because once a “cause” becomes an institution, it must fund itself, defend itself, and govern itself, and those needs incubate the same sins reformers claim to oppose. It maps the movement’s internal conflicts into recurring fault-lines. First is authority: church courts and local ...

In broad strokes, the document shows that “eternal vital union” among Old School Baptists is not a random oddity but a specific way of talking about how Christ and his people are related in eternity, and how that relation intersects with Adam, the fall, and time-bound regeneration. At its core, eternal vital union is the claim that the elect are not merely decreed or foreseen in Christ, but that they truly stand to him as children to a Head in an eternal, living relation before the world began. In Gilbert Beebe’s pieces, that union is pushed very far: the elect are an “eternal seed,...

“1832: The Great Baptist Separation—From Local Churches to the Benevolent Empire,” argues that the Old School–New School conflict was not a polite intramural quarrel but a nationwide re-wiring of Baptist life—a rolling series of fractures (late 1820s → 1830s → into the 1840s) driven by whether churches would submit to a new institutional “benevolent empire” (boards, societies, Sunday schools, seminaries, press) or reject it as extra-scriptural machinery that displaced the local church and the Spirit’s direct work. The paper does three big things: Defines the camps and ...

This book argues that Paul’s phrase “the elemental spirits of the world” (ta stoicheia tou kosmou) in Colossians and Galatians refers to a blend of hostile spiritual powers and the basic religious “ABC’s”—rules, rituals, and philosophies—through which those powers enslave people before Christ. 1. What stoicheia meant in the ancient world In classical Greek, stoicheia usually means elements or building blocks: letters of the alphabet, basic principles, or the four elements (earth, air, fire, water). In Jewish and Greco-Roman thought, these “elements” and the stars could ...

This book argues that Greek and Roman rhetoric is less a museum piece than the durable “engineering logic” of public persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos—developed through Greek democratic courts and assemblies, sharpened by the Sophists and critiqued by Plato, systematized by Aristotle, and then pragmatically refined by Rome through Cicero’s canons and Quintilian’s moral program for forming a speaker. It then traces how this rhetorical bloodstream flowed into Christian preaching—most directly in the Latin West through Cicero → Augustine → later homiletics, and in the Greek...

This bookt frames Edwards, Hopkins, and Fuller as one “Edwardsian ecosystem” expressed in different church habitats—Congregational New England (Hopkins) and Particular Baptist England (Fuller)—and it does so explicitly through Old School Baptist eyes, i.e., with the controlling suspicion that this whole line (however brilliant) proved practically corrosive to “sound Baptist doctrine.” The thesis is clean: Edwards supplies the conceptual machinery, Hopkins systematizes and weaponizes it into an activist ethical program, and Fuller translates Edwards into an anti–Hyper-Calvinist...

Puts Luther (1525), Jonathan Edwards (1754), and Old School Baptists—Absoluter wing into one frame to compare “free will,” predestination, and lapsarian order. Moves from definitions → doctrine → exegesis → pastoral use, then closes with a source-based Beebe section. Big theses Luther: After the Fall the will is in bondage; conversion is monergistic (God alone). Scripture’s revealed will guides preaching; the hidden will is adored, not dissected. Emphasis: Law/Gospel and assurance. Edwards: Compatibilism—we always choose according to the strongest present motive; sinners ...

In the New Testament, the normal sequence is simple: people believe, are baptized, and are added to a local church. Baptism isn’t a free-floating rite; it’s the public doorway into a community that teaches, communes, and practices accountability. Paul treats baptism as incorporation into Christ’s body. Practically, that means “baptized but permanently unjoined” doesn’t fit his framework. Baptism signals belonging that’s meant to be lived out in a real congregation. The famous edge case (the Ethiopian eunuch) shows the order still holds even when geography is awkward: faith →...

Isaiah 14:12, with its phrase hêlēl ben-šāḥar (“shining one, son of dawn”), originally referred to the King of Babylon in the form of a prophetic taunt-song (Isa. 14:4). The image of the morning star (Venus) mocked the arrogant ruler who exalted himself as divine but was cast down to Sheol. In Jewish interpretation, the passage was seen as satire of a human king, not a story about Satan. Early Christian writers, however, such as Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian (2nd–3rd centuries), were the first to apply the verse allegorically to Satan’s fall. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (4th ...

This document outlines the theory that our universe may be a simulated reality, akin to a computer program. It references philosopher Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, along with comparisons to theological concepts such as God’s sovereignty. The document contrasts secular simulation theory with Christian doctrines of divine control, and includes mentions of thinkers like Sabine Hossenfelder, Karl Popper, Descartes, and George Berkeley, as well as the film Dark City as a metaphorical illustration.

This study argues that nineteenth-century “ministerial education” must be interpreted as a central organ of the broader evangelical “benevolent empire,” not as a neutral aid to piety or a simple upgrade in clerical literacy. The opening chapters trace how an interlocking network of voluntary societies (Bible, tract, missions, Sunday school, reform, educational) generated a logic of holy efficiency—identifying religious “needs,” raising funds, building institutions, and standardizing personnel—within which seminaries functioned as the system’s nervous system: they existed ...

Your book argues—pretty coherently—that the “methods” of interpretation are real tools, but the decisive issue is spiritual epistemology: who makes the Word living to the hearer? The thesis is that grammatical-historical constraints (grammar, genre, historical setting) are valuable as guards against interpretive acrobatics, yet they remain insufficient to produce saving understanding. The foreword frames this with the central contrast: method can dissect; only the Spirit can vivify—illumination being defined not as new revelation, but as the Spirit opening the reader to perceive, ...

According to a book from 2020, “non-causative predestination” is basically a modern guardrail phrase: it tries to protect two claims the author insists Scripture teaches plainly—God’s sovereignty over all events and God’s holiness as “not the moral author of sin”—without letting human “logic” bully the Bible into choosing only one of them. The Foreword’s core complaint is that many controversies come from confusing mystery with contradiction. A contradiction would be God being holy and unholy “in the same sense.” Mystery is God being “sovereign over all events”...

From an Old School Baptist (Absoluter) perspective, everything in your document is one diagnosis with several symptoms: modern evangelicalism keeps inventing parallel religious machinery—voluntary societies in the 19th century, then the “benevolent empire,” and now parachurch pipelines—and those machines inevitably develop their own authority (boards, payroll, metrics, brand logic) while remaining outside the accountability of a local congregation. The deepest objection is not “doing good” or “reaching youth,” but rival governance: a second center of gravity forms beside the...

Chapter 22 of the Second London Confession (“Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day”) is treated with caution and partial acceptance. Old School Baptists shared many doctrines with their seventeenth-century forebears, but they eventually rejected the prescriptive and Puritan frame of that chapter because it became, in their judgment, a platform for ecclesiastical formalism and programmatic worship—precisely the tendencies the Black Rock Address later condemned. 1. On Regulated Worship Old School Baptists agree that worship must rest on explicit Scriptural warrant—a “Thus saith ...

The book traces the Nicene Creed from its fourth-century origins into its later reception among Old School Baptists, using both patristic history and Trott/Beebe as lenses. It begins by outlining what the Creed is in its 381 (Niceno-Constantinopolitan) form: a compact confession of one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ “true God from true God” and “of one substance with the Father,” the Holy Spirit as “Lord and giver of life” worshiped with Father and Son, and one holy catholic and apostolic Church, one baptism, and the hope of resurrection. It situates this formula within ...

This book is a compact, historically anchored argument that treats Sunday School less as a neutral “church activity” and more as a modern institution with a theology baked into its machinery. It opens with a brief foreword framing the piece as a continuation of (and response to) ongoing criticism of the Old School Baptist position. In the first movement, Sunday School is defined in its modern, recognizable form—an age-graded, volunteer-run “learning hour”—but its origins are located in late–late-18th-century social conditions: industrial poverty, child labor, and a push for ...