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Longenecker on Romans
Article by September 2016
Because of the impact of Romans on the Church's overall theology, commentaries on Romans tend to take on disproportionally more importance than, for example, commentaries on Micah. Richard N. Longenecker has just produced a large (1,207 pages) scholarly commentary on Romans in the prestigious New International Greek Testament Commentary series. His The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary on the Greek Text has a distinctive thesis as to the "central thrust" of Romans continue
Van Til's Critique of Barth's Christology (Part 2)
In the first post in this series, we gave consideration to Van Til's assessment of Barth's Christology. In this post we wish to examine Barth's own teaching on Christology. The key to understanding Barth's Christology is to understand where...
The Missing Message
While preparing talks for a forthcoming Reformation Conference, I happened across Heiko Oberman's outstanding 1961 Theology Today lecture, "Preaching and the Word in the Reformation," in which he set down what he believed to have been the three most important...
The Eternal Subordination of the Son Controversy: The Tension Between Bible and Doctrine
The current debate surrounding the eternal subordination of the Son (ESS) has highlighted a number of existing tensions in evangelical theological circles. Perhaps one of the most significant of these is the tension between dogmatic and biblical theology. The...
Jesus Loves Me, This I Know...
On April 23, 1962, Karl Barth (the renown 20th Century Swiss-German, neo-orthodox theologian) spoke at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago. Many have reported that, during the Q & A time, a student asked Karl Barth, if he could summarize...
The Guilt of Pastoral Ministry
As I was re-reading a section of Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving, these words made a Facebook debut: "We asked our summit pastors, 'What obstacles stand in the way of your fruitful, growing walk with...
TOPICS: overworking, pastoral ministry
Validity, the Mind of God and Confessional Christianity
A while back I wrote a post on the parasitic nature of absurdity. Absurdity, as a concept, is only meaningful when set against a backdrop of rationality. Whenever we conclude something is absurd, however, we are not only judging it to...
Why Complementarianism Remains Important
Recent months have seen considerable controversy among conservative Christians around the topic of complementarianism, arising mainly from a false analogy between the subordination of wives to husbands and that of God the Son to God the Father. Depending on...
TOPICS: complementarianism, Marriage
On Burials and Bargains
Upon the surface, Genesis 23 seems rather curious in its choice of emphases. In the terse space of a single verse it records Sarah's death and Abraham's mourning (Gen. 23.2). The remaining twenty-odd verses (Gen. 23.3-20) of the chapter...
