God’s Glorious Answer to the Evil of Our Present Day
Evil exists to magnify the redeeming grace and glory of God through the unparalleled atoning work of Jesus Christ.
He is Yahweh, the transcendent Lord of all. There is no other God. The Sovereign of the universe indicates His total control over the events of history by using a merism, which is a common Hebrew literary device expressing completeness. A merism contrasts two polar extremes as a way of highlighting everything in between. In... Continue Reading
Grave Men Facing A Grave Faith
A report on a series of leading serious intellectuals who recognize the need for Christianity’s resurrection but can’t quite bring the faith to life in themselves.
Viewing Western civilization with its Christian soul cut out, many are now willing to say: “We need Christ.” What they are unable, thus far, to say, is: “I need Christ.” But the political must become personal. Peterson appears to understand that—and is awestruck by the reality of it. For now, historians like Niall Ferguson recognize... Continue Reading
Discerning the Christian Imagination: Analogies and Proportion
Wrong views of God lead to poor musical, poetic, or literary analogies. Poor analogies lead to wrong views of God.
Believers need to grow simultaneously in two areas: an awareness of what responses God deserves, and an awareness of how works of imagination communicate. To fail in the first area is to allow the profane, the blasphemous and the false to enter the Christian imagination, by virtue of not knowing God as He is. To... Continue Reading
Broadening Churches Break, Will the PCA?
Here is how the contemporary broadening of the PCA differs from the PCUSA. You could argue it begins with Good Faith Subscription.
Breadth seems to be afflicting the PCA. The affliction is certainly different from the broadening of the PCUSA roughly one hundred years ago. But in one way it is similar. “Evangelicals” like Charles Erdman, professor of practical theology at Princeton and opponent of Machen within the seminary and the church, believed a denomination could be... Continue Reading
Is the Old Testament Unintelligible without the New? Important Considerations on the Relationship between the Testaments
Treating the Old Testament as a riddle and the New Testament as its decoding key may be intriguing, but it posits many significant challenges for a high view of Scripture that is consistent.
That the Old Testament could not be understood without the New is not even consistently held by proponents of this refrain. In all fairness, many who repeat this saying actually produce quality exegesis in Old Testament texts without ever reading the New Testament back into their texts. So why then the assertion? It is not... Continue Reading
What Does the Death of Cultural Christianity Cost?
To lament the decline of cultural Christianity is to lament not simply the loss of a Christian consensus, but the loss of the social capital born of common grace that secular society was borrowing from.
Some of the critiques against “cultural Christianity,” or those who depict all cultural manifestations of Christianity as motivated by power, leave me thinking in response: Would we rather the church be permanently relegated to the margins? There is no intrinsic benefit to existing on the margins. Should we not pray for the gospel’s advance in... Continue Reading
The Logic of Westminster’s Confession
He supposes that the Westminster theologians wanted to first consider God’s acts followed by man’s response. He was on the right track.
To lose this basic context and methodology is to lose something of the richness of the theology itself. Today we are indebted to those who are calling us back to the roots of our Confession of Faith, which Warfield so aptly described as the “ablest and ripest product of that Great Reformation, which was so... Continue Reading
The Subtle Sin of Prayerlessness
Our understanding of the reality of spiritual warfare greatly influences whether or not we will develop the habit of God-dependent prayer.
Lack of diligence in prayer leaves us in a vulnerable position, making us easy prey for temptation. He called the disciples, and thereby us, to constant prayer, “that [we] may not come into temptation.” Prayer is necessary to keep us spiritually alert to the weakness of our own flesh and its propensity to sin. Lehman... Continue Reading
What Divine Generation Is Not
Divine, eternal generation must be distinguished from human, temporal generation.
Since the Son is begotten of the Father’s essence, there is “no partition, or withdrawing, or lessening, or efflux, or extension, or suffering of change, but the birth of living nature from living nature”; eternal generation is “One from One,” that is, “God going forth from God.”11 Or as the Nicene Creed says, the Son is... Continue Reading
The Vital Signs of American Christianity: Critical but not Terminal?
Churches should certainly be doing outreach, but more than that, we need to do a lot more “in-reach.”
Every major wing of American Christianity declined just in this latest six-year period. To make matters worse, these were the alarming vital signs well before the COVID-19 tsunami. By all accounts, church involvement has plummeted enormously since Spring 2020, and will struggle to revive to even close to these dismal 2019 levels. The only question... Continue Reading
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