Reformed Dogmatics

Top Highlights

“Thus then we have from the very essence of God, by unchangeable principles, demonstrated three modes of subsistence or persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and that in such wise, that they cannot be more or fewer, unless it be denied that God is God. We shall wind up the whole proof by a single syllogism. In an essence in which there is perfect knowledge bending back upon itself, an Image is begotten and a Spirit proceeds on the impulse of the will. And yet these things inhere in the one, most single essence of God. Therefore there will be in the same essence the Begetter, the begotten Image and the proceeding Spirit’” (Pages 107–108)

“The divine attributes are not something different from the nature and existence of God, so that the latter may be thought of as distinct from the former: nor are they parts of the divine nature, so that their total makes up the unity of the divine nature; nor are they something accidental, so that God’s nature would be thinkable without the attributes; in God’s nature there is nothing which is not God Himself. Rather the attributes of God are the divine nature itself in its relation to the world. And since God is essentially nothing else but absolutely single actuosity, every separate attribute of God is the identity of the whole divine being, as the latter is displayed in relation to a definite object.” (Page 57)

“To man there belongs naturally and essentially a consciousness that there is a God, and that Him he is bound to honour.—Calvin (I, iii, 1): ‘God has Himself implanted in all some kind of grasp of His ‘numen.’ ’—P. Martyr: (praef.) ‘Knowledge of God—is naturally innate in the minds of all.’—Burmann (I, ii, 16): ‘Religion flows from the very nature of God and man; hence religion is the necessary and natural sequel to reason, and so natural religion datur (is something given).’” (Page 1)