RFPA Blog News

As to Conditions (10)

This tenth article in the series 'As to Conditions' was written by Herman Hoeksema in the May 15, 1950 issue of the Standard Bearer. ____________ Before I proceed with my discussion of condition, I want to call the attention of our readers to something I wrote almost twenty years ago, and in which I apparently teach conditions myself. I refer the reader to Volume VI, page 90, ff., of the Standard Bearer. This passage occurs in a series of articles which have been published in pamphlet form under the title, Calvin, Berkhof,...

Read More

As to Conditions (8)

In our last article under this heading we referred to Canons heads three and four, article 12, which speaks of regeneration. And at the close of that article we had several questions which we now shall discuss.

The first question in whether, if faith is a condition, regeneration must not also be considered as conditional, as something which man must fulfill in order that God may give him the grace of regeneration. That would seem to be almost an impossible conception, but it is also a conception which seems to be implied in what the Rev. Petter writes in Concordia of Feb. 2, 1950. For there he writes that the Spirit of regeneration, the Spirit of salvation, comes after repentance and is related to the latter as a condition.

Read More

As To Conditions (1)

In his editorial in the March 15, 2020 issue of the Standard Bearer, Prof. Russell Dykstra recommended reading ‘As to Conditions,’ a series of Standard Bearer articles written by Rev. Herman Hoeksema in 1949. Over the next eleven weeks, we will be posting one article from the series each week.

This first article in the series 'As to Conditions' was written by Herman Hoeksema in the October 15, 1949 issue of the Standard Bearer.

_____________

As the reader knows there has been, for the last year or so, a controversy in our papers about the question of conditions in the covenant of God. The question was really whether the term “condition” could be used properly in Reformed theology, and especially whether it could be used to express Protestant Reformed thought.

The controversy was introduced by the Rev. A. Petter who defended the use of the term and evidently conceived of the possibility of its being used in a sound Reformed sense. He even thinks that we need the term in order to express a necessary element in the Reformed conception of the covenant, the element of the responsibility of man.

Read More