A friend once commented to me, echoing Wolterstorff, that there are three currents in the Reformed river. First, there are the pietists, to whom personal conversion and resultant personal devotion is everything. And then there are the doctrinalists, to whom precise doctrinal conformity to the Canons of Whatsitburg are everything. The third group is the Kuyperian, …
A Constant God
This post does not need to be an extended response to Green Baggins. He largely agreed with the chapter in RINE on assurance of salvation, and had just a couple questions or concerns. The first was his response to my statement that we should not try to “peer into the secret counsels of God, or …
No Covenant Children
Just a brief comment here, building off the discussion of my Frank Turk post. Frank said this: “But Dr. Clark baptizes babies for the sake of adding them to the church. Just because he doesn’t add them to the church in practice doesn’t mean he’s not doing it in theory, does it?” There is a …
Scrawny Little Olives
After something of a lull, I am picking up my conversation with Green Baggins over my book “Reformed” Is Not Enough. Chapter 13 is on church unity, and Lane and I actually have a healthy bit of agreement here. For example, he agrees with me on the legitimacy of receiving Roman Catholic baptisms “in order …
Frank the Baptist Nails It
I wanted to promote something said by my friend Frank Turk in the comments section of a previous post. Frank is one of those baptists, and, as such, he sees the intramural presbyterian dust-up much more clearly than some of the participants do. Here is Frank, with one of the best observations that this whole …
The Pope’s Easter Hat
Scott Clark has had some more to say, and he says it here. As part of his conclusion, he says: So, let the covenantal moralists, the New Perspectivists, and Federal Visionists (and related folks) have their semi-Pelagian grace and cooperation with grace system. If they want to try to stand, on the basis of grace …
FV Critics and Grad School
Critical thinking skills are essential in reading comprehension. Someone has done us a valuable service here in applying this truth to the FV debate. Take a look.
Baptism and Salvation
Matt Yonke, the young man who posted a blog piece on how the FV affected him in a Rome-ward direction, has posted a follow-up question on baptism. Someone else has reasonably asked for a contrasting response from an FV person. So this post is my response to Matt. His question is here: “Here is an …
FV As the Death Star
Just a quick point for the record. In partisan politics, spin doctors will seize on any event and work it to fit with the agenda, the talking points, and the memo that they got just before going on the air. In a presidential debate, a candidate could perform at about the level of Miss South …
Catholic Evangelicalism
With the FV controversy in mind, I was asked this last week whether I considered myself more “basically”evangelical or more “basically” Reformed. With the one qualifier that if you believe both, then to answer the question is not to say which you believe to be “more true,” let me address it this way. As I …