We’ve all felt the pressure to speak out about things that we know little to nothing about. The increasingly prevalent sentiment is that if Christians-and especially Christian leaders-don’t speak up on the hot button issues of the day, then they…
According to Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of spiritual despair in Sickness unto Death, in terms of faith (see the first post in this series) and consciousness (part 2 and part 3), despair is the universal condition of being without God and…
In its reform of the pulpit ministry of England, assembly members agreed on the rough outlines of a sketch of preachers and preaching. This final study summarizes seven points of a mainstream puritan vision for the pulpit as articulated by…
In its reform of the pulpit ministry of England, assembly members agreed on the rough outlines of a sketch of preachers and preaching. This final study summarizes seven points of a mainstream puritan vision for the pulpit as articulated by…
The opening sentence of John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion alone is worth a lifetime’s contemplation: ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and…
Over the years it has been my practice, learned from others, to offer up praises and petitions framed by a passage of Scripture. Some of these passages were read in preparation for preaching, others offered material for meditation in daily…
In 2011, the session of the church that I pastor sought to educate and assist the members of the church regarding proposed changes that we had decided to make to an important aspect of our corporate worship services. Prior to these…
I’ve been preparing a talk on Luther and education for a conference this summer, and so have been reviewing Luther’s 1524 “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools.” In examining this work,…
I recently happened across a picture online, in which a group of young adults were linking arms at a well attended Christian Conference. The person who had posted the picture wrote a caption underneath it that said something along the…
In the previous post in this series, I made some remarks upon the meaning of the term κεφαλή, especially in the context of 1 Corinthians 11:3. Challenging the supposed meaning of this term among certain advocates of the eternal subordination…
