The first chapter of Americanism is entitled “I Believe in America,” and it reveals the basic problem. A number of people have wanted to say that America is “dedicated to a proposition,” and that we are not bound together by those ties that bind other nations — things like language, culture, music, food, and common …
Greenbaggins Does Too Take an Exception
Under the heading of “No Exceptions,” Lane has responded to my last post this way: I do not take any exceptions to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Wilson conveniently forgot to mention WCF 28.5, when he argues that I need to take an exception to the Standards: ‘Although it be a great sin to contemn …
What It Must Have Meant
One more and I am caught up in my exchanges with Greenbaggins. But before answering the questions he raises about my chapter on baptism, I think it is important to address a question raised in the comments of my previous post. “You make it sound like you’re boys playing king of the dirt pile. Say …
Greenbaggins Takes an Exception
And in his latest response to my response, Lane says this in the course of his continued discussion of Warfield. “Regeneration can happen before baptism, during baptism, or after baptism. Therefore, it is not dependent on baptism.” This really gets at the crux of the matter between us, and it illustrates why I believe that …
Sanctions and the Sacrament
I believe that this next interaction with Greenbaggins promises to be pretty helpful. He is still critiquing the tenth chapter of RINE. “In other words, for Wilson, the objective nature of baptism means that all people who are baptized come into the same relationship to the covenant, in this sense: that they are all under …
Fall Conference
It was recently brought to my attention that I missed a question in the comments section of one of my shameless appeals. David Bayly asked this about our ministerial conference in October: “Further information on this would be helpful for those of us who have to plan significantly ahead to attend such conferences. For instance, …
Anselm and Creedal Advance
As surprising as it may seem to some, the church grows and matures in her understanding over time. In other words, some battles are actually won, and certain doctrines are really established, and they stay established. Some of this can be seen in the pages of the New Testament, and other examples are found at …
Their Consistency is Our Hypocrisy
“What the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless Christian cities before and after that time, but the carnage was less pardonable because, unlike the Muslims’, it was not justifiable by Christian religious tenets. From the distance of almost a millennium, …
Commie Criticism
“By insisting that most art, high and low, exists for the sole purpose of reinforcing bourgeois-capitalist consciousness, the ‘critical theorist’ gets to be a revolutionary. But by dictating the handful of exceptions that achieve true ‘negation,’ he also gets to be a snob” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 78).
Well Of Course We Can Do That
“In fact, as we have seen, every church has a liturgy. Every church has an order of service. But those which deny they have a liturgy have the side ‘benefit’ of not having to defend what they do scripturally. To take an example from each side of this thing, a minister of a church which …