Over at Canon WIRED, I recently answered a question about child communion, and that answer elicited this response. Since these are reasonable questions on a complex subject, let me add just a few more thoughts (three to be exact) to the matter. First, we hold the formal requirement for entry to the Supper to be …
Calvinism and Conspiracy
We live in a time when conspiratorial theories abound, and when tracts, screeds, and web sites advancing such theories proliferate. If you have the time, you might want to research and answer every box on the flow chart (the one with the Masons, the Illuminati, and the Bilderberg Group on it). But if you don’t …
Fatherless Under the Fig Tree
Hard libertarianism and/or anarchy is a function of what might be called civic fatherlessness. Just as the antitheist regards the eternality of the Father as tyrannical on the face of it, so also the hard libertarian regards any civic authority whatever as something to chafe the soul. Within this paradigm, all political authority is based …
Saul’s Slide Begins
INTRODUCTION:God is the Lord of all things—and this means that He is Lord of both the inside and the outside of a man. Sin loves to divide them in two, and yet God does not permit it. True faith begins on the inside, but does not rest content until the outside is brought under. If …
Chalices and Platters I Never Asked For
We have before us bread and wine. We also have before us the choice of whether or not to renew our covenant oaths with God honestly or not. Never forget that the principle issues are not the bread and wine. “For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He …
Ecclesiastical Immigrants
A month or so ago, I exhorted you all to mark your calendars for the Fall Conference that is coming up in September, and I urged you to remember that this was not just an fyi thing, but rather an event of some strategic importance. I wanted to follow up on that, explaining it a …
Let God Be True
“Christendom has more than once been full of baptized infidels. Does this make God a liar? Certainly not. Paul then comes to a remarkable statement. Every last professing believer in the world could be lying, and doing so through the teeth, and God would still be true, the root would still be firm, the tree …
Turns Out the Shulamite’s Belly Is Not the Great Sanhedrin
“The sixteenth century Reformers are rightly given the credit for having recovered this [grammatico-historical] method by rescuing biblical interpretation from the fanciful allegorizations of medieval writers. When they spoke of the ‘literal’ meaning, they were contrasting it with the ‘allegorical’; they were not denying that some passages of Scripture are deliberately poetical in style and …
So We Should All Pray Psalm 25:14
“Why do baptists not understand the covenant? The answer not what many paedobaptists want to hear — the baptists do not understand it because paedobaptists do not understand it” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 95).
Unpacking the Suitcase
“Properly speaking, ‘exposition’ has a much broader meaning. It refers to the content of the sermon (biblical truth) rather than its style (a running commentary). To expound Scriptured is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, pp. 125-126).