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- The Ecumenical Creeds
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- Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008).
- How Virtue Ethics Helps Address Final Salvation Through Works
- Is Faith A Virtue?
- Office Hours: Sanctification And Virtue
- When Nice Is The Highest Virtue
- Of Virtues True And False: Niceness v Christian Virtue
- When Bellicosity is No Virtue and Other Beauties
That Hobbesian “war of all against the all” is the rule and the normal condition for the world in its fallen condition, isn’t it? There is no truth for the blind and deaf fallen and reprobate world. So christian motto must be “Nil admirari”. But I didn’t decide, must a christian of our age be a “laughing Democritus” or “crying Heraclitus”.
We do believe in the restraining providence of God and in what Perkins and others called “common grace,” i.e., those gifts with which God endows unbelievers for the general good of society. We recognize them as coming from God. Graciously he restrains evil so that life is not always “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” nor a “war of all against all.” Hence, we’ve not usually looked to the Leviathan, the great central state, to restrain evil (since everyone who serves the state is equally capable of abusing their authority) but to God.