What is True Love?

This brings us to the question, “what is true love?”  We may say that one person truly loves another when he has a greater desire to please that person than he has to please himself.  And the correlated truth is: one person truly loves another when he would rather suffer himself than see that one suffer.  In the final analysis, there are just two moral principles which may govern one’s actions: the first is that which has one’s own interests as its final motive or supreme object and is, therefore, the selfish principle.  The second, is that which has the interests of others as its final motive and is, therefore, the self-giving, sacrificial principle.  This second is the principle which God manifests in His relations with His people.  Consequently, the greatest message that anyone can hear is that “God is love” (1 John 4.16), for that means that God’s holy nature seeks to express itself actively toward him and that he will, therefore, be fitted for the divine presence.  On Calvary, more than anywhere else, the great loving heart of God has been revealed to man.

From: “The Atonement,” in Studies in Theology by Loraine Boettner (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1947), p. 290.  “The Atonement” was originally published as a separate small volume in 1941.

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990), a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (1929), was a gentleman farmer in his native Missouri, as well as a teacher and a well-regarded author on theological subjects.

 

Loraine Boettner Pretends to Join the OPC…

…or, there’s one set of rules for the elite and another set of rules for us peasants.

Boettner did not hold ministerial credentials in the OPC, as he was never ordained to the gospel ministry.  However, he did join the OPC in 1965, albeit in a highly irregular manner.  As a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America [PCUSA], most notably at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, Boettner was alarmed by that chuch’s upcoming adoption of the Confession of 1967.  Consequently, he wrote his Princeton classmate, William Harllee Bordeaux, about being granted absentee membership at Westminster Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Westchester, Illinois.  The session accepted his request and, though he lived in Missouri and never moved to Westchester, he remained on the rolls of Westminster Church until his death.

From: “How Evangelical is Rome?  Van Til, Strimple, and Roman Catholicism” by Danny E. Olinger, in Confident of Better Things: Essays Commemorating Seventy-Five Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by John R. Muether and Danny E. Olinger (Willow Grove: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2011), pp. 26-27, n. 5.

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990) was a conservative Reformed lay theologian and prolific author who was well-known and fairly influential during the middle decades of the 20th century.  The cynic in me says that no ordinary, normal, typical member of the OPC could have gotten away with this.

 

On Eternal Generation, Once Again

The Eternal Generation of the Son, as stated by a representative theologian, is defined as: “an eternal personal act of the Father, wherein, by necessity of nature, not by choice of will, He generates the person (not the essence) of the Son, by communicating to Him the whole indivisible substance of the Godhead, without division, alienation, or change, so that the Son is the express image of His Father’s person, and eternally continues, not from the Father, but in the Father, and the Father in the Son” (Dr. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, p. 182).The following Scripture verses are commonly given as the principal support of this doctrine: “For as the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself” (John 5:26); “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John 14:11); “Even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee” (John 17:21); “That ye may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father” (John 10:38); Christ is declared to be “the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance” (Heb. 1:3); “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

The present writer feels constrained to say, however, that in his opinion the verses quoted do not teach the doctrine in question.  He feels that the primary purpose of these and similar verses is to teach that Christ is intimately associated with the Father, that He is equal with the Father in power and glory, that He is, in fact, full Deity, rather than to teach that His Person is generated by or originates in an eternal process which is going on within the Godhead.  Even though the attempt is made to safeguard the essential equality of the Son by saying that the process by which the Son is generated is eternal and necessary, he does not feel that the attempt is successful.  If, as even Augustine, for instance, asserts, the Father is the Fons Trinitatis – the fountain or source of the Trinity – from whom both the Son and the Spirit are derived, it seems that in spite of all else we may say we have made the Son and the Spirit dependent upon another as their principal cause, and have destroyed the true and essential equality between the Persons of the Trinity.  As we have stated before, when the Scriptures tell us that one Person within the Trinity is known as the “Father,” and another as the “Son,” they intend to teach, not that the Son is originated by the Father, nor that the Father existed prior to the Son, but that they are the same in nature.

This, apparently, was also the position held by Calvin, for at the conclusion of his chapter on the Trinity, he says:

“But, studying the edification of the Church, I have thought it better not to touch upon many things, which would be unnecessarily burdensome to the reader, without yielding him any profit.  For to what purpose is it to dispute, whether the Father is always begetting?  For it is foolish to imagine a continual act of generation, since it is evident that three Persons have subsisted in God from all eternity” (Institutes, Book I, Chapter 13). 

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990), The Trinity, originally published in two parts in The Evangelical Quarterly in 1938 and 1939; republished in Studies in Theology (Phillipsburg: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1947), pp. 121-122.