Faith

Throughout history, people have been fascinated by angels, those mysterious beings who pop up in Scripture at important times. Around the Christmas story, there are lots of angels. They worship God the Trinity. They serve at God’s bidding. They never sit in God’s presence. They never share God’s...

Eight years-ago this month a friend gave me a copy of N.T. Wright’s new book, Justification: God’s Plan...

One of the aspects of the New Perspective of Paul is a focus on the corporate, as opposed the individual, aspects of justification and salvation. In the Christian church today, there is a move by some to “correct” an overemphasis on the individual believer. The desire is to focus on the corporate...

On 17 August 1560, the Scottish Parliament read twice and with great care a newly drafted Confession of Faith. It was an important document for a transformed nation that had just won the right to abandon Roman Catholic worship and adopt a Protestant theology, liturgy, and church order. A Little...

One of the more contentious issues in the history bibliology has been over the relationship between the human and divine in Scripture, an issue to which B.B. Warfield devoted so much of his attention. Jeff Stivason has served us well in recapturing Warfield’s emphasis on concursus, an idea perhaps...

I n this final installment of the series on union and communion with Christ, I will continue to consider practical benefits of this doctrine. More specifically, I will look at how we might use this doctrine to spur us on towards love and good deeds. Thomas Lye, in his sermon entitled, The True...

My Sunday school teacher posed this question during class a few years ago. The question surprised me because the answer seemed obvious. If God is so far beyond my comprehension, how could he be simple? Therefore, he must be complex, right? Wrong. The teacher was not referring to whether God was...

The debate over worship and liturgy has been both long running and many faceted. Its spectrum ranges from the ultra-free self-expression of certain types of contemporary worship through to the high liturgies of traditional Roman Catholicism and its Episcopalian counterparts. A debate that is very...

It was 1543. North of the Alps, Protestant reformers were busy publishing books. In Rome, the papacy was busy banning them. Still, the publishers in Venice, a proudly independent republic with a reputation of opposition to the pope, were persistent. That year’s best-seller was an Italian essay by a...

The Bondage of the Will is one of Martin Luther’s most important and enduring works. It represents his greatest defense of the doctrine of predestination and was written as a response to Erasmus of Rotterdam. I have previously described the relationship between these two men and the circumstances...