INTRODUCTION: The Word of God comes to us in many ways, with many figures and devices. We are comfortable with many of them, and not quite so comfortable with others. One of the areas of discomfort is the biblical practice of using types and antitypes. This is not just a literary device of God as …
Get ‘Em Before the Controversy Blows Over!
The special edition of Credenda on the Federal Vision is now out and should be in your mailbox any minute, if you haven’t already taken it out. We knew there would be a great deal of interest in this one, and so we took the liberty of printing up some extras. They are now available …
Not Shades of Twilight
Throughout the book of 1 John, we see detailed treatments of three basic tests of genuine Christianity. They are the moral and ethical (keeping God’s commands), the familial (loving one another), and doctrinal (believing the truth). In this passage of his letter, we find John addressing the first two of these. Now by this we …
Puritan Poetic Glory
“Historians whose sympathies are Roman attribute the catastrophe to the Reformation. But if the cause lies in that quarter at all it must be sought in some peculiarity of the Scotch Reformation; for in England the old religion had no such poetical glories to show and the new had many” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in …
Why There is War in the House of War
“In Islamic law there are only two types of nations—a nation that is of the house of Islam or a nation that is of the house of war” (Mark Gabriel, Islam and Terrorism, p. 47).
Turns Out He Was Holding Back
“We turn now to another point in this list of the various things one has to consider in a sermon whether written or extemporary, namely the place of humour in preaching . . . What makes all these things difficult is that they are natural gifts, or the place of the natural gifts, in this …
The Moral Conscience Has a Chainsaw
“What they got—and by extension what the nation that supported them got—was something that completely surpassed their intentions, but a something which nonetheless substantiated the moral law in a way they could not have foreseen and which they probably would still not admit. To recapitulate the past forty years of film history, which was in …
Jury-Rigged Women
“The answer is that we do not want feminine leadership; we want more feminine leadership. The men in our pulpits for many years have been simply jury-rigged women; when the request come to bring in the real thing, on what principle will the request be denied? We cannot say that we must have masculinity in …
Filling Up the Outline
“Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that great preacher, did not write out his sermons in full; he just prepared and used a skeleton” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 214).
Slender Assurance
“Western media have poked fun at the Muslim understanding of Paradise (heaven)—virgins for men to enjoy and so forth—but it is much more significant to recognize that dying in jihad is the only way a Muslim can be assured of entering Paradise at all” (Mark Gabriel, Islam and Terrorism, p. 29).