“This means that a minister must not be the kind of person who apologizes for breathing. Every man called to the ministry shares Paul’s sentiment on the one hand — who is sufficient for these things (2 Cor. 2:16)? On the other hand, he must be the kind of man who tells these sentiments of …
As Sort of a Globo-Joke
The attendance of Constantine at the Council of Nicea was striking, but more striking than that was the existence of such a subversive council in the first place, and with an emperor’s knowledge and blessing. More about that in a moment. It is often said that in his conversion Constantine was only seeking a unifying …
Warm, Friendly, and Distant
One of the optical illusions created by the decision to home school or to have your children in a private Christian school is a significant one. It is this. The temptation is to think that in the home school, success or failure is fundamentally a parental matter while in the private school, success or failure …
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 …
Andrew and Ashlynn
God loves to teach us by throwing one thing alongside another. Parallelism is one of His central teaching devices, and He has many ways of putting things in parallel. When two things are lined up together, we compare and contrast them, and we see what they have in common and in what ways they are …
And I Mean All the Furniture
“This is why the question of women’s ordination is emphatically not about a simple matter of including women in Christian ministry. It is not a simple matter of rearranging the furniture. This is about redefining the nature of Christian ministry, in order to make it compatible with another religion entirely. And this is why, once …
Avoiding the Arbitrary
“Traditionalists are fighting a rear-guard action, trying to keep women out of a post that they clearly more qualified for than men are. Feelings can run high in the debate, but the debate is essentially over whether men only or women and men both should occupy the post of an essentially feminized office. If anyone …
Maybe Two Word Studies
“Depending on the issue and the text, liberals are sometimes more to be trusted with the message of the text than conservatives are. This is because liberals are not stuck with the results of their exegesis the way conservatives are. Because conservatives confess that the teaching of the text is normative, the conservative has to …
Because the Disobedient Don’t Care
“Settling this exegetically won’t settle anything, as the last several decades have demonstrated. If there is enormous pressure to go in this direction, and there is, then we need to bring the gospel to bear on what is causing that pressure, and stop bringing isolated texts to the symptoms of that pressure. Trying to stop …
Compare and Contrast
“At the same time, we don’t want to assume that any position that ticks feminists off must be biblical. That can’t be right — it is far too easy to do. And, as with so many issues, we have to distinguish different levels and layers. If, as I have noted, our holy fathers used to …