If I may, I would like to ask your permission to go up the stairs three at a time here. Great. Glad that’s all set. What I mean by that is that I want to assert a number of things together in order to indicate a pattern. The argument for some of these things has …
Future Grace
The evangelical hinge is not whether sacraments accomplish the blessings they speak of. The issue is whether they accomplish every blessing they speak of. The sacraments, like the Scriptures, like the gospel itself, like the very existence of the Church, are eschatological. The words of baptism are future-oriented — from that moment forward, the baptized …
New-fangled Christological Ideas
In this place my friend Tim Bayly takes my friend Peter Leithart to task for what he wrote here. What are we to take away from all this, besides “my, what interesting friends you have”? I read through Tim’s piece a couple times, and did the same through Peter’s, and here are a few preliminary …
A Helicopter on the Front Lawn
This last week my friend Peter Leithart did some musing out loud about some problems that he identifies as resulting from an emphasis on the “legal status” of righteousness. One post, “How to Say, ‘I Am Righteous'” is here, and another related post on Luther and imputation/infusion can be found here. In response I have …
Greg Boyd’s Demons
Someone has said that in politics a gaffe should be defined as accidentally speaking the truth. Another possibility that is not limited to the truth — or to politics, for that matter — is the option of someone saying what he actually thinks before anybody is quite ready for it yet. That is what Greg …
No Servants With Flamethrowers
Sometimes the Bible tells us not to accept certain outrageous things, and we wonder to ourselves, “did churches really need to be told that?” The answer is yes, they did. So do we. For example, Paul once said that no one speaking by the Spirit could say certain things. “Wherefore I give you to understand, …
Scissors and Library Paste
And now we come to a cautionary tale about what happens when a theologian is left alone with scissors, library paste, and a Bible. Greg Boyd is done with the hard work of letting the ski boat of hermeneutical silliness get him up on the surface, and he is now jumping the wake and doing …
Gospel Guardians
I want to follow up on our earlier discussion having to do with how much of the gospel a man can misunderstand or be ignorant of and still be saved by it. Can a faithful Roman Catholic, accepting what Rome erroneously teaches about the gospel and salvation, still be saved? This came up because of …
Dogs and Brothers
If you would be so kind, please allow me to say a few more things about how essential sola fide is. A few weeks back, I did a segment with Darren Doane on Ask Doug about whether Tolkien and Chesterton were saved, followed it up with a few posts here, and then earlier this week …
Treacherous Merit Ladders
A few days ago I told a little story about a justification test being administered at the Pearly Gates. If you missed it, you can find it here. And now comes a magnificent article on the same subject by Mark Jones over at Ref21. It is not a trivial point. Years ago a woman, talking …