Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I think this is important enough to point out again: [T]here is a difference between rejecting forgiveness which condemns and rejecting, in this life, the belief in the existence of the forgiver which need not condemn. Agree, disagree? Update. Ultimately accepting forgiveness is also compatible with a temporary false belief that one does not need [...]

Here.

What do you think are the reasons for the $1.3 billion fine? (1) Microsoft’s rivals’ envy and failure to be competitive on the marketplace. (2) Intellectual failure to recognize all anti-trust legislation as harmful to the economy and the consumers. (3) The desire on the part of the state to humiliate Microsoft, show it who’s [...]

What Christ offers is first and foremost forgiveness of sins, both original (assume that there is such a thing) and actual, and the latter because of the former. In other words, by forgiving the original sin Christ relaxes the Covenant of Works which requires absolute perfection, such as only He and Mary were capable of, [...]

When I thought of Christ’s having two natures yet being one person, I always conceived of the natures as shorn of personhood. But this is obviously untenable, and Hodge sets me straight: “Christ possesses at once in the unity of his Person two spirits with all their essential attributes, a human consciousness, mind, heart, and [...]

Chapters XVII and XXII are absolute must-reads in Hodge’s Outlines of Theology. And I was under the impression that I originated the idea of a contract between the Father and the Son, termed by our author the Covenant of Redemption in one version of the explanation of this matter, in which “[t]he Son promising to [...]

Calvinism seems to despise human nature, picturing it as “totally depraved,” corrupt, and incapable of any good. Pelagianism lapses into the opposite error, holding that “nature retains the ability to conquer sin and to gain eternal life even without the aid of grace,” as well as that Even if Adam had not sinned, he would [...]

Just as humans have within themselves traces of the Trinity, namely, their essence, and the word of the intellect and the love of the will proceeding from it, so God, too, has these three things. Now every normal human being is one man and one person. But when we ascribe perfection to these aspects of [...]

One useful, though surely unintended by its authors, lesson a person might draw from the movie The Bucket List is that there are two ways of responding to the realization of impending death or even of the general undisputed fact of life’s shortness. The first is “consume more.” The characters in the movie respond in [...]

Daniel Larison, a blogger at The American Conservative magazine’s website, wants, according to this writer (at Andrew Sullivan’s blog), “to see the United States splinter into a half-dozen or more pacifist agrarian republics.” That’s way too few. But pacifist is awesome, and as for agrarian, if Daniel knows any economics, he will reply that in [...]

The active life is led by Guardians and Artisans; the contemplative, by Idealists and Rationals — the first of each pair being the yin, the second, the yang of the temperaments.

Lew Rockwell writes that “[e]nvironmentalism has long been a counter religion, with roots in ancient pagan nature worship.” And George Reisman distinguishes between the greenies who “merely… like to see flowers bloom on open meadows and love trees, whales, and polar bears, and the like” from their more destructive cousins. It used to be that [...]

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Shaffer at the Austrian Scholars Conference in 2003 at the Mises Institute in Auburn, AL. Here’s what, he says, should be the proper content of free trade agreements.

His view is that had Adam persevered in righteousness and remained obedient to God (in every way, including not eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), then he and Eve and, presumably, their descendants would have earned instant glory, which amounts to “infallible, moral excellence, and inalienable blessedness,” after [...]

The absurdity of this question should be immediately perceived after reading this post, where the relevant argument is that “our nature is created for the sake of our virtues (a truth manifested in the move from the beginning to the proficient state), and our virtues are attained for the sake of happiness (the move from [...]

Our author has what seems to me to be an extremely clever approach to miracles. Acording to Hodge, a miracle need not be a violation of the laws of nature. God should be thought of as pervading nature (perhaps by essence, presence, and power, a la Aquinas’s opinion) and, like some world-soul, able to, directly, [...]

When you read a story like that, you are inclined to make one of the following two conclusions. The first is that the government agency, which has the mandate to regulate the industry in the general and common interest of the consumers, unfortunately let a few bad apples through. It happens, no big deal; perhaps [...]

Socialism always ends up with an inhuman face (on the part of both the rioters and the police). What strange happenstance!

Hodge is upset that some consider the purpose of creation to be the happiness of creatures rather than God’s own glory. (Outlines of Theology, 243ff) His crucial argument is that this “subordinates the Creator to the creature, the greater to the less, as the means to an end.” His concerns are hardly appropriate. For suppose [...]

In this important, though flawed, article Craig confuses Christianity as the necessary and sufficient means to salvation with Christ or God the Son and the Holy Trinity as the necessary and sufficient means to salvation. For it seems to me that Christ can save you even if you have never heard of Him or of [...]