Ref21 Blog

On April 23, 1962, Karl Barth (the renown 20th Century Swiss-German, neo-orthodox theologian) spoke at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago. Many have reported that, during the Q & A time, a student asked Karl Barth, if he could summarize...

As I was re-reading a section of Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving, these words made a Facebook debut: "We asked our summit pastors, 'What obstacles stand in the way of your fruitful, growing walk with...

A while back I wrote a post on the parasitic nature of absurdity. Absurdity, as a concept, is only meaningful when set against a backdrop of rationality. Whenever we conclude something is absurd, however, we are not only judging it to...

Recent months have seen considerable controversy among conservative Christians around the topic of complementarianism, arising mainly from a false analogy between the subordination of wives to husbands and that of God the Son to God the Father. Depending on...

Upon the surface, Genesis 23 seems rather curious in its choice of emphases. In the terse space of a single verse it records Sarah's death and Abraham's mourning (Gen. 23.2). The remaining twenty-odd verses (Gen. 23.3-20) of the chapter...

There are a number of reasons why I have been following with great interest the debate over the ESV's recent change of translation of Genesis 3:16 (see this and this). First, it is clear that the complementarianism debate will necessarily...

In the recent resurgence of interest in the theology of Karl Barth--particularly among evangelicals1--theologians of no mean significance have opined on Cornelius Van Til's writings about the dialectical theologian. Van Til, according to some, offered an "absurd"2 and "inept...

Eugene Thacker, in his Nihilistic masterwork In the Dust of This Planet offers a quote at the very beginning by Arthur Schopenhauer: "The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features...

Leon Morris once suggested that "the atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith" and that "unless we are right here it matters little . . . what we are like elsewhere" (The Cross in the New Testament, p....

Last Friday, September 2, 2016, a group of students at Clemson University gathered to protest the suppression of free speech by campus officials. Christian evangelist Robbie Roberts had been removed from campus for sitting in a chair with a small...

Over the years it has been my practice, learned from others, to offer up praises and petitions framed by a passage of Scripture. Some of these passages were read in preparation for preaching, others offered material for meditation in...

The last year or so has witnessed some controversy about the meaning and value of the term complementarianism (not to be confused with complimentarianism, which is belief in people who pay me compliments) to describe men and women's respective...

Søren Kierkegaard is surely one of the most influential and misunderstood influences on modern Western thought and especially contemporary theology. This is a bit surprising for someone who wrote in Danish and styled himself neither a philosopher nor a...

I left for England from Los Angeles in September 1977 because of one man and one book: J. I. Packer and Knowing God. Looking back, it was quite naïve of me to undertake such a journey knowing so little...

Worship and the House of PrayerJoin us in Powder Springs, GA from October 20th to the 23rd for the 2016 Reformation Worship Conference. The speakers will include Carl Trueman, editor of Mortification of Spin; Jason Helopoulos, contributor for The...