The Holy Spirit is active in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This word sacrament that we use comes from the Latin word sacramentum, which in its turn is the translation of the Greek word mysterion, or mystery. In what way is this a mystery, and how does the power of the Holy Spirit come …
Say It Again
You know that God is the only Lord. You know that He is to be worshiped in accordance with His holy Word. You know that the gospel is the only life to be had in this wretched world. But remember also that this gospel proclaims a new creation, a new heaven and new earth. This …
Westminster One: Of the Holy Scripture
1. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; (Rom. 2:14–15; 1:19–20; Ps. 19:1–3; Rom. 1:32; 2:1) yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of His will, which is necessary …
Introduction to Confessional and Systematic Theology:
Remember that a systematic understanding of any given text is really synonymous with a formal understanding of the text. Understanding of a work is impossible unless there is an ability to summarize it, and summary is nothing but a systematic distillation. The real enemy is systematic misunderstanding of the text (not to mention systematic misapplications). …
Try, Try Again
A couple years ago, I started posting a series of notes on the Westminster Confession. But I never finished posting them, I didn’t like the format I was using, and there I was, like the guy with the half-finished tower in the gospels. Not to mention the prospect of having to exposit that stuff about …
History is Organic
“We must also recover a doctrine of generations. Our children grow. They do not grow up in a detached way, as though the twig were unrelated to the branch, which in turn is unrelated to the tree. Our children are not interchangeable ball bearings, able to be placed in different machines across the world; they …
Subversiveness Is Bad?
“When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesn’t know about Carl Jung’s theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model . . . The screenwriters admit Shrek’s Jungian ideas: ‘The book is very clever, because …
One for the Many
“Caiaphas is stating the same political reason we have given for the scapegoat: to limit violence as much as possible but to turn to it, if necessary, as a last resort to avoid an even great violence. Caiaphas is the incarnation of politics at its best, not its worst. No one has even been a …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 32
Introduction: This is categorized as one of the penitential psalms, but the heading lists it as a maskil, a teaching. In one of the other penitential pslams (51), David vows that as a result of his forgiveness, he will teach sinners the way (51:13). It is quite possible that this pslam is a fulfillment of …
Sensibilities and Powers
Let me begin with an outrageous conclusion, and then try to defend it. This is not usually a good procedure because it just gets everybody’s back up, but if the outrageous conclusion is actually the voice of sweet reason, then why not? Here is the conclusion, in a short series of statments. The only genuine …