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Last week, I got myself entangled in a Twitter discussion stemming from a post about Donald Trump rushing to execute death row inmates before his term is up. I wasn’t so much interested in the original post but rather the tweet below it. A lady said: “I’ve never understood how people can claim to be pro life but also pro death penalty. It’s like they only care about a life before birth after that everyone is SOL.”  In response I said: “Big difference between the two—the unborn are innocent victims that never got a chance to live; murderers have taken the lives of innocent victims, of which the death penalty is their just due, unlike the unjust death penalty given to the unborn.” I figured that should clear things up. But it just stirred up the nay-sayers and fallacy flingers (but it did get 45 hearts!). And then she responded back with, “There have been innocent people on death row. What about them?” Do you see what she did? She tripped over the fallacy of false equivalence. False ...

In his fascinating work, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ , [1] J. Todd Billings sheds light on Calvin’s eclectively developed (yet speculatively restrained) metaphysic that structures his understanding of a believer’s union with God. In so doing, Billings dispels contemporary critics (Radical Orthodoxy ‘Gift’ theologians) who claim that Calvin’s theology was heavily influenced by late medieval ‘nominalist’ tendencies. Gift-giving specialists adopt the metaphor as a framework for “the relation of divine giving (in creation and redemption) and human giving (self-giving love)”(2). And according to ‘Gift’ theologians, the place of unilateral sovereignty in the Reformed tradition—with Calvin as the poster child—has eradicated any type of active (gift-giving) role in man’s relationship with God (and with that, a believer’s communion with Christ—the “ en Christo ” hallmark of Pauline theology). From Calvin’s account (not according to Calvi...