Sean Michael Lucas’s fascinating book, For a Continuing Church, highlights in no uncertain terms the vital importance of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church to the origins of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Next to the authority…
Calvin apparently lived with a profound awareness of the potential for death that constantly accompanies us as human beings. In 1.17.10 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Reformer provided a rather sobering catalog of the “innumerable … deaths…
I suspect that 2015, from a Christian perspective, will go down in history as one of the darkest and gloomiest years of human history. The cavalier destruction of human life, in the name of religion, is on the rise worldwide.…
I suspect that 2015, from a Christian perspective, will go down in history as one of the darkest and gloomiest years of human history. The cavalier destruction of human life, in the name of religion, is on the rise worldwide.…
Sodom. Arguably the most notorious city in Scripture. We cannot read or hear its name without our thoughts running to certain sins (most likely sexual in kind) that famously found a home there. Given John Calvin’s reputation for a certain…
Somewhat curiously, Calvin judged “the great number of inns” populating the landscape of his day to be rather obvious “evidence of our depravity” — the “our” in question being, in the first instance, early modern Europeans. What prompted such disapproval…
Scripture’s account of God’s command to Abraham to “circumcise the flesh of [his] foreskin” (Gen. 17.11; KJV) affords Calvin ample opportunity to reflect on the reality and nature of sacramental signs. Thus he is keen, in his comments on this…
“Hagar, servant of Sarai.” So the angel of the Lord addressed the Egyptian slave (Gen. 16.8) who had the great misfortune to be drawn into Abraham and Sarah’s scheme to assist the realization of God’s promise (Gen. 16.1-6). Upon the…
Given the controversies surrounding justification in his day, it’s no surprise that Calvin camps out on Gen. 15.6 (“[Abraham] believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness”) for a significant space of time in his commentary on…
In a New York Times’ article from August 2010, Paul Vitello described the serious difficulties faced by many Christian ministers in America today: “Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans.…
