Reformation21

It has been a good couple of months for the celebrating of life at memorial services. First, there was the celebration of Michael Jackson's life and then there was Ted Kennedy, enfant terrible turned elder statesman. Both men, in their different ways, were proof positive that, in modern America,...

In order to establish the doctrine of penal substitution we are not dependent on a few isolated proof-texts here and there in Scripture. The doctrine is woven indelibly into the very fabric of the account of the crucifixion, with numerous threads drawn from the Old Testament. Rather than...

"You're not going to preach right through Job are you? This is going to be so depressing!" Such, at first, was the reaction of one or two of my congregation at the church door on Sunday morning after I began a series of twelve sermons working through this great book. Not the most encouraging of...

Theology and literary flair. These days it seems never the twain shall meet. The former often suffers from clunky constructions and idiosyncratic pedantry; but when mixed with the latter, however, it turns sweetly succinct and yet able to ply the heart, catapulting it upward. It's no mistake that...

In last month's Wages column, I reflected upon my experience in Rome and Padua shortly before Christmas, a week that involved both the awesome beauty of the Vatican, the dazzling intellectual accomplishments of Catholic theological education, and the weird folk religion that surrounds relics such...

On the whole, I have always taken the position that I do not respond to hostile reviews, simply on the grounds that the reviewer is entitled to his or her opinions, and the reading public is entitled to weigh the arguments and come to its own conclusion; but the recent review by Iain H. Murray in...

While the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Synod, a confessional evangelical Presbyterian denomination, has worked for some years to gently turn around its increasingly secularized Erskine college, the reality of difference between the denomination's and the former board and present...

Under-Powered Preachers Last year a member of my congregation gave my wife and me tickets to the U2 concert in Boston. The seats were amazing, and the concert was even better. Bono and company did not disappoint. But almost equally incredible was the staging. The band performed on two stages: one a...

None of the systematic theologies I own include `being as thick as two short planks' in their treatments of the divine attributes; but it appears that there is a trend today to rectify this neglected aspect of God's being. Bear with me while I explain. I remember while at Cambridge in the mid-80s,...

[The following article is taken from the book, Should Christians Embrace Evolution ? (ed. Norman Nevin and published by IVP -UK, 2009). The book it to be published soon in the USA by P & R. Permission to republish was kindly given by both IVP-UK and P&R.] Evangelical Christians have...