Ref21 Blog

Garry Williams, the English theologian who is one of the most articulate scholarly advocates of penal substitutionary atonement,has recently published an article on the extent to which the Church Fathers can be regarded as holding to the doctrine.  It is...

Sam Allberry does a great job in his book ''Lifted - Experiencing the Resurrection Life''. There are 4 sections on Assurance, Transformation, Hope and Mission. Sam writes with freshness and a great turn of phrase. On Jesus authority he says,...

A passing comment about "asking Jesus into my heart" had Paul Helm's brain in contortions.  See his comment here....

Now that it is official that the kind of questions raised in the third and fourth centuries relative to Trinitarianism are nothing more than the constructs of a bunch of middle aged white guys, it is worth perhaps spending a...

Reformation21's own Rick Phillips wrote a thoughtful and charitable piece on the PCA's "Meeting of Understanding" here. ...

Pastor Chris Anderson has a very perceptive post from a Fundamentalist perspective, on recent events.    On another note, these recent events have really only brought to the surface tensions and problems which are bound to exist when one tries to...

Apologetics is a defense of the Christian faith; the word "apologetics" comes from a Greek word that means defense. In my last article, I mentioned that apologetics has been concerned, perhaps overly or exclusively so, to answer philosophical challenges with...

In the last week, three great new(ish) books have landed on my desk.First, the Rev. Thabiti Anyabwile has taken time off from preparing my Festschrift to write an excellent little volume entitled Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons.  It is part...

Many thanks to Richard Barcellos for sending this link in.  It may prove helpful to some in understanding the Oneness movement....

A Librarian, whose tailor wishes to remain anonymous, has written to complain about the Librarianophobic nature of some of the comments on this blog.   On legal advice, we reprint the whole of his missal below:Reverend Sir:I am writing to...

Thanks to the great and the good (both the vocal and, more worryingly, the strangely silent), I am sure many pastors of churches will now have to waste a lot of valuable time reading the works of T D Jakes...

A number of Ref21 readers have emailed and asked me to comment on the Elephant Room.   To be honest, Frank Turk, over at TeamPyro, has expressed what thoughts I do have but better than I could have done so.  One...

My attempt to trigger class warfare by blaming the English public school system for the popularity of annihilationism seems to have worked, with a mass rising of the OBN and the OST to protest my thesis.   Indeed, Pete Sanlon...

Anglican theologian, Pete Sanlon, recently sat down with Dr. Alister Chapman to talk about the latter's new book on the life and ministry of John Stott.   The interview is now available here.With all of the uncritical adulation that typically...

Watching The Iron Lady was a strangely emotional experience.   As for anyone who came of age in eighties Britain, the formative years of my life were dominated by the presence of Mrs Thatcher.  The riots of 81, the Maze hunger...