It is increasingly difficult to think of Christmas as remembrance of Jesus’ birth amidst the gifts and other aspects. The day involves fusing the sacred and secular and such efforts immediately or eventually simply do not work out well because Scripture comes in conflict with the world. I think the world has turned Christians from... Continue Reading

A Presbyterian missionary to Africa told me several years ago that Africa is large with peoples of many cultures and languages distributed over its varied topography that provides a spectrum of climates from Cape Town to Casablanca to Cairo. Africa is a mission field that is complex with unique challenges. The nearly 800 pages of... Continue Reading

The argument Machen makes powerfully in Christianity and Liberalism is that liberals in the 1920s had abandoned the Christian religion—that though liberal Protestantism tried to go by the name Christian, it was actually an entirely separate religion. He makes this case methodically throughout the book, contrasting the two religions with regard to doctrine, God and man, the Bible,... Continue Reading

The Psalms teach us about salvation. There is no salvation to be found in chariots or spears or horsemen or political power. Salvation is from the Lord. When God saves sinners, he forgives their sins. He counts righteousness to them through faith. God is the refuge and the rock of his people. He pulls them... Continue Reading

In everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the... Continue Reading

An intelligent designer might seem more necessary than ever now that we understand so much cellular biology, and the impossibly long odds facing any attempt to design proteins by chance, or assemble the regulatory mechanisms that control the life cycle of a cell. Meyer doesn’t reject Darwinian evolution. He only rejects it as a sufficient theory... Continue Reading

The “formal equivalence” approach to biblical translation strives to bring the original-language source-text to the reader by effecting as close to a word-for-word translation as possible, given the constraints of moving from one language to another. By contrast, the “dynamic equivalence” approach (sometimes called “functional equivalence”) aims to bring the reader to the source-text through... Continue Reading

John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence—Published in 1846, this volume provides both a defense of Calvin’s eucharistic doctrine and a wonderful introduction to the soteriology of the Mercersburg Theology movement we associate with John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff. In it, Nevin called out much of the American Reformed community for its rationalistic Zwinglianism and lack... Continue Reading

As Flynn explains, by “denying the principle that things really do, unexceptionally, have explanations, we throw ourselves into a catastrophic, self-defeating skepticism, where nothing can be counted as knowledge, or any belief rationally justified, including—and this is important—the belief that things lack explanation.” In short, brute facts end up being a universal acid that eats... Continue Reading

The Father is indeed our source of peace (Col.1:2). And his work of reconciliation through the death of his Son is the foundation of our future and final hope. Thus the hope of the gospel is Christ. The Father has accomplished our redemption and reconciliation through his Son in order to present us blameless at... Continue Reading