I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully. The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching …
Ecumenical Polemics
This morning Trinity Reformed Church and Christ Church held a joint service, which we do every year on Reformation Sunday. Peter Leithart preached from Galatians 2 and 3, on Trinitarian justification, and while he was preaching, several of the premises he laid out on the way to his conclusion had an additional benefit of helping …
Grace Running Around Loose
I know that not all the readers of this blog are Protestant, but most are, and so I would like to ask you all to take a moment to thank the Lord for the faith and courage of our dear brother, Dr. Martin Luther. We are now just seven years away from celebrating 500 years …
Pressurized Two by Fours
And I can’t let this one pass by. In the course of his argument, Carl Trueman mentioned an oddity that he had noticed — that men who are conservative in their theology, and capable of great precision and nuance, turned suddenly simplistic when it came to political analysis. Hey, worth thinking about, right? But the …
Life Outside the Confession
The hurly burly of life is exasperating to the tidy-minded, and the tidy-minded always want to carve out a niche where that exasperation can be ameliorated. That carved out niche is an artificial world where the rules can be enforced — as they can be enforced in a chess game. For Reformed Christians who are …
Regular Wine That Got Here Remarkably
When Jesus is teaching Nicodemus about the absolute necessity of the new birth, Nicodemus does not understand what He is talking about. In response to that bafflement, Jesus says this: If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things (John 3:12)? Catch …
An Interview At the Pearlies
Scott Clark has a long post here, in which he urges Reformed congregations to hold the line on strict subscriptions to their confessions, applying that standard of subscription with regard to the members of their congregations. In contrast to that form of Reformed sectarianism, here is a dose of Reformed catholicity. “In all Churches a …
Orthodoxy in a Box
The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of my perennial Sunday morning books, and this morning I was reading along, minding my own business, when one of the characters tried to deliver a confessional blow to my federal vision sympathies. He said, and I quote . . . “For to talk of such things is most profitable; …
Three Reasons Why There Has Been An FV Controversy
A young Reformed believer heading off to college should be able to learn the five solas of the Reformation — yea, even the six ordinary days of creation. But this requires further development. Over the last number of years, since the eruption of the FV controversy, we have of course been involved in the public …
A Limerick for the URC
There was a conservative and Dutchy denom That passed a report with indignant aplomb. But we never bleed, If our critics can’t read, And so here’s to a missing-the-point pheenom. . . . I don’t believe I have ever footnoted a limerick before, so here you go.