Westminster Confession of Faith

The best doctors are diagnosticians. Those who have hidden the taxonomy of pathogens in their cerebral cortex and are able to ply their knowledge to the often distorted complex of a patient’s woes – that, is a doctor indeed. The best of the Puritans were the best of spiritual doctors. Let’s imagine...

“The greatest of all Protestant heresies is assurance.” Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) [1] Can we know that we're saved? That question was at the heart of the Reformation. Rome taught that professing believers could never be certain of their salvation. For this reason, believers needed to...

This week on Theology on the Go our host, Dr. Jonathan Master will be on the receiving end of the questions. So, Dr. Jeffrey Stivason joins the program to interview Dr. Master on the important topic of the assurance of salvation. Dr. Master is dean of the school of divinity and professor of...

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...

Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by Dr. Joel Beeke. Dr. Beeke is President and Professor of Systematic Theology and Homi­letics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, a pastor of the Heritage Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, editor of...

E very society has a rulebook, but living in one’s birth culture creates a blind embrace of its practices, norms, and expectations. We believe certain things about speech, social cues, and even driving habits with little awareness of what we prize or why we prize it. Behavior witnessed out­side the...

Not long ago I received an email asking a question. Its impetus was from the Westminster Confession of Faith. The person wanted to know how the Westminster Assembly could have taught that God is impassible when the Scriptures clearly teach that He can be angry, jealous, loving, compassionate and so...

Chad B Van Dixhoorn, Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Banner of Truth, 2014). Chad van Dixhoorn once described a dream of his in which he was puzzling over the handwriting of the original minutes of the Westminster Assembly. In his dream, as he agonized...

My wife and I are planning a fairly substantial gardening project in our front yard (she more enthusiastically than I). We’re going to uproot some bushes that no longer seem to fit, and are planning to plant other flowers in their place. It’s all fairly conventional, I suppose, and right now it...