Is Your Spiritual Life a Battle?
Do you ever feel like life doesn’t get any easier? The world is throwing you punches and all you can do is duck and dodge? Do you feel like just living day-to-day is like a climb uphill? Your spiritual life…
Category Reformation21
A Response to Mark Jones and Gert van den Brink
We’re grateful Oliver Crisp has offered his response to the two reviews of Deviant Calvinism which were published this week. Oliver’s contribution serves to extend an important conversation over the character and sources of Reformed theology ~ Editor I wish…
Personal Reflections on “Deviant Calvinism”
How wide or narrow is the Reformed faith? In his recent book, Deviant Calvinism: Broadening Reformed Theology, Fuller Seminary Professor, Oliver Crisp, uses the tools of historical theology and analytic theology to address various questions, such as the broadness of…
Dear Bryan: Replying to “The State of the PCA”
This week a letter titled The State of the PCA was published by Bryan Chapell in By Faith, the denominational magazine of the PCA. This public letter is another of the many takes in recent years on our denomination from…
An Analysis of “Deviant Calvinism” (Part 1)
The question of how diverse the Reformed tradition is is an important topic of consideration. I have co-edited a volume on Reformed diversity in the seventeenth century, and later this year I have another co-edited volume coming out on Reformed…
Gratitude for Government: Calvin contra Contempt for Civil Authority
In Calvin’s estimation, the Christian life is properly one of constant gratitude. Gratitude bears fruit in holiness — we can and should say “thank you” to God with our lives as well as our lips. The root of gratitude is…
The death of prayer meetings
People do what they want to do. Regrettably, when it comes to Christians, they seem to not want to pray together at prayer meetings. As a pastor, I’m concerned how many Christians have such energy for the things of the…
Two-Kingdoms Economics
Although the two-kingdoms paradigm can provide a valuable lens for viewing any area of our social and cultural lives, for most of us, few areas loom larger than our economic lives. Preachers often tend to tactfully steer clear of financial…
The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology
Hans Schwarz, The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. $24.99 After years of relative neglect, theological anthropology has been on the rise lately. In the last few years alone, we’ve seen books like Michael Welker’s The Depth…
The Fruit of the Spirit: Love [part 2]
You can read the introduction to this series, which appears on a monthly basis, here ~ Editor I At the head of the apostle’s list of the Spirit’s fruits stands love, the principal virtue from which the others derive and of which…