On the Creative Will of Covenantal Grace

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Notes

^1. While Margulies omits all capitalization from his writing, I have restored it in the passages that I cite from his book. I have also at times slightly modified the punctuation, wording and grammar in the passages that I cite. The book contains numerous instances of misspelled and missing words.

^2. Margulies also states that “we have no scientific evidence or psychological intuition” that proves that any existing thing “has ever been created ex-nihilo or will be destroyed ad-nihilo” (285).

^3. In his chapter “On Faith and Reason,” Margulies observes that “there ought to be no conflict between faith and reason” since “faith responds to questions of existential meaning” and reason involves scientific questions regarding “factual laws of nature” (345). He thus fails to see that for Kant reason constitutes practice (and so the ethical duty to love your neighbor as yourself) and that Spinoza writes (in the Ethics, Part 4, Proposition 18) that the “dictates of reason” are ethically based on the practice of not doing unto your neighbor what you do not want your neighbor to do unto you.

^4. See note 3.