Mark McDowell persuaded me to return briefly to Ref21 on the promise of pre-empting the annual TGC/YRR Ashandlentfest and, as a side attraction, the possibility of arousing the Anglicans from their dogmatic slumbers. It plays out here: The trap baited.…
Charles Spurgeon suggested that the pastoral prayer may be the most important element of the church’s corporate worship. That may have been a bit of hyperbole. It may even be apocryphal. But I would suggest that a time for the…
Adonis Vidu, Atonement, Law and Justice: The Cross in Historical and Cultural Contexts. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2014. $24.99 Theology does not occur in a vacuum, we are constantly reminded. The Church’s doctrines do not develop in isolation from the…
Adonis Vidu, Atonement, Law and Justice: The Cross in Historical and Cultural Contexts. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2014. $24.99 Theology does not occur in a vacuum, we are constantly reminded. The Church’s doctrines do not develop in isolation from the…
I am grateful to James Merrick for his thoughtful and measured response to my piece on Lent and for providing me with an opportunity to address the matter further. Reading Merrick’s response, I suspect one of my ecclesiological assumptions…
There are plenty of commands in Scripture to be discerning. As I am reading through Christopher Ash’s excellent commentary on Job, I am realizing what a great illustration this book of the Bible is on the significance of separating the…
It’s that time of year again: when we catholic Christians brace ourselves for the blizzard of blog posts by chilly Puritans who hope to warn their flocks against the vices of Ash Wednesday and Lent. I don’t have much interest…
How can we avoid the extremes of monocausal fatalism, on the one hand, and open theism which insists that some events are “pointless” even to God, on the other? As I immersed myself in the Psalms after my cancer diagnosis,…
It’s that time of year again: the ancient tradition of Lent, kick-started by Ash Wednesday. It is also the time of year when us confessional types brace ourselves for the annual onslaught of a more recent tradition: that of evangelical…
No, not Carl’s triumphant return to provide a window into the mind of “Luther” Levy, but rather the celebrity anti-celebrity’s latest offering, considering Luther on the Christian Life (Crossway, arriving later this month). We are promised many good things between…
