Category Reformation21

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Remembering Dr. Morton H. Smith

Dr. Morton H. Smith, founding professor of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS), founder of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary (GPTS), first Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), and one of the world’s foremost authorities on American Presbyterian history and…

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Accommodating Rome?

Probably the most interesting Reformation celebration that I had the privilege of participating in last month took place in a Roman Catholic Church. The Center for Evangelical Catholicism here in Greenville, SC graciously invited me to join with two other…

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Luther’s Royal Marriage

Martin Luther was an outsized personality, with great faith and some great flaws. Living with this great person has a good effect on you. Let me commend his little book, The Freedom of a Christian. When he challenged the practice…

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Francis Turretin on Justification

Francis Turretin was the grandson of a Protestant Italian merchant who had emigrated to Beza’s Geneva. When Turretin died in Geneva in September 1687, nearly 170 years had passed since Martin Luther had sparked the Protestant Reformation by posting the…

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James, Justification and the Human Court

I have often taken comfort in the fact that the Apostle Peter said that Apostle Paul wrote “some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15-16).  I…

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The Troublesome Doctrine of Biblical Authority

In the years 1518–1519, the Leipzig Debates were called and conducted between Johann Eck and Martin Luther, among others, in Pleissenburg Castle in Leipzig Germany. At the time, Luther would have presented the latest instance of the annoying humanists and…