Editor’s Note: This article reflects the main ideas of Davenant’s teaching on justification, though some of his careful distinctions and nuances can’t be fully captured in a brief summary. For his exact wording, readers should consult his Treatise on Justification.…
Justification by faith alone. Sounds simple enough, and in some respects it is. In the PCA we admit people into membership who acknowledge they are sinners and trust in Christ alone for salvation. In a certain sense, we are requiring…
Life is too short not to reap the spiritual benefit of reading Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. Archibald Alexander, the first professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, once said that this particular work was the most influential…
The function of the literary imagination is to incarnate meaning in concrete images, characters, events, and settings rather than abstract or propositional arguments. To use the formula of Dorothy Sayers, the imagination images forth its subject, and in turn it is a…
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…
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…
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…
This year we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation when the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed a long series of academic debating points about the medieval Roman Catholic penitential system (the 95 theses) to…
As there has been no small debate in recent decades over the doctrine of justification, I was delighted to come across a treatment of the once-for-all nature of justification in Geerhardus Vos’ Reformed Dogmatics. Having introduced the subject by explaining…
The Protestant Reformers, following Scripture’s lead, roundly rejected the notion that believers might be justified in part or in whole by their own good works. Sinners, they maintained, are justified wholly on the basis of Christ’s perfect righteousness imputed to…
