Jesus Christ

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...

Since the 1980s, a movement called the New Perspective on Paul has been a rising star in Biblical studies and Pauline scholarship. The movement primarily started through the writings of E.P. Sanders’ 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism as he explored the Second Temple Jewish texts and reexamined what...

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...

In the Western world at least, the glory of the church seems to be fading fast. Far from those days when her influence was far-reaching and wide-ranging, her values and opinions respected and her numbers strong; she has become the object of public ridicule and, too often, seen as the great...

More on the Benefit of Christ My earlier post on the 16th-century booklet The Benefit of Christ has elicited many responses. Several people have pointed me to this edition https://archive.org/details/benefitchristsd00palegoog , which I had seen before. It’s not a faithful translation and is written...

Beware the church that is always trying to make Christianity cool again; far more often than not, their hearts are preoccupied with what the world wants than what God wants. Of course it could be argued that Christianity has never been cool. That’s fine. St. John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ...

I n this penultimate installment of the series on a puritan doctrine of union and communion with Christ, I want to consider the comfort “this glorious union with Christ” brings to dying saints and to “their surviving mourners” (Case). Thomas Jacomb says that we have no reason to be afraid of death...

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...

In this quincentennial year, marking Martin Luther’s memorable act of defiance in Wittenberg, much has been said regarding his famous dictum about ‘the Word doing its work’. Far from attributing the impact and success of the Reformation on his own natural abilities or dogged persistence, he humbly...

Few doctrines are as central to Christianity as the doctrine of the Trinity. That God is Triune is not just a confession of faith but it is also at the core of our worship. We worship the true and living God and it is vital that we know who He is. To this end God has revealed who He is so that we...