Creeds & Confessions

Some of the most influential women in church history were princesses or queens, who had the ability to establish a state religion according to their convictions. At a time when cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion) was in order, the Protestant church prospered best under Protestant...

Last time our hosts discussed why one must study theology. Now Jonathan and James give practical tools to do just that in the form of book recommendations. These will encourage us to see the importance of the doctrine of God. They will also teach us something about contemplative theology and gazing...

God’s Providence is a wonderful thing. The Westminster divines spoke of it in these terms: ‘God's works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions’ (WSC 11). The Heidelberg Catechism captures in warmer tones like this: ‘God'...

C ontemporary Christian sayings are not necessarily new. In the last article, I pointed out that Edward Reynolds, an important member of the Westminster Assembly, encouraged us to ask what would Jesus do in a particular situation. Reynolds is not alone in building a bridge between the Puritans and...

What comes to mind when you hear the words “systematic theology”? For many Christians, they think of the halls of academia and the debating of obscure and minor details related to God. But for most of the history of the church, systematic theology was a discipline done for the church and by...

The Bible has a single theme: God’s visit to His world. * To believe this is to walk with Christian thinkers of 1900 years. But today, evangelicals see Scripture as discrete texts, lacking a unifying theme. We look at the literal meaning of ‘wisdom,’ largely ignoring its usage in the One Author’s...

The Westminster Confession of Faith begins with what many have deemed some of the most well articulated statements concerning the doctrine of Scripture. And incorporated right into the confession’s understanding of Scripture is a brief, little clause on how one might do theology. The clause, which...

A fter setting out the nature of the church in Article 19 , the next three articles underline the sufficiency of Scripture in its application to the church’s polity and practice. Articles 20-22 thus take up several aspects of the church’s authority in light of the doctrine of sola scriptura , that...

We often pray the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer after sinning. We should learn to pray the sixth petition before similarly sinning again, remembering, ye have not because ye ask not (James 4:2). The essence of the sixth petition, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (...

If all your paperwork rolled like a sea over your desk, you’d struggle to navigate and prepare your tax returns. If you blanketed your computer’s desktop with all your digital files, you’d smother the writing of a departmental report. So is any unorganized library a maze of confusion. This is why...