Reformation21

Last month, Pope Francis expressed his opinion that the death penalty is unacceptable in all cases . At the same time as he took his public stand, a series of popular opinions circulated online about whether or not the death penalty was to be viewed as valid as a Christian position. The better part...

Books are marvelously powerful. Thomas Aquinas is said to have feared the "man of one book," and no wonder: a great book has great power to transform the soul. And in my own life, the recently translated prolegomena volume of Petrus van Mastricht's late seventeeth-century Theoretical-Practical...

John Hooper, the English Reformer and pastor, was burned at the stake for his unwavering stand upon the truth of Scripture. In 1555, just three weeks prior to his martyrdom, John Hooper gave the following charge in a letter: "You must now turn all your thoughts from the peril you see, and mark the...

The young man was sitting in the airport, wearing a Harry Potter World cap and a simple black tee shirt. The non-stylized white text on the shirt was small enough to make you linger an extra moment in order to read the sentence: "Freedom of speech is not a license to be stupid." This slogan, in...

When addressing the subject of the inerrancy of Scripture in light of difficulties with which we are confronted in Scripture, E.J. Young would teach his students the following truth: "The believer," he said "will labor to reconcile seemingly contradictory details we encounter in various portions of...

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 commonplace that what literature...

When I moved to the United States from Great Britain in 1964, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. America seemed so Christian then. The only dark blot on the landscape was that people feared the rise of Marxism throughout the world. Communism was the great threat, the political expression of...

We cannot properly interpret what God does, as He has recorded it for us in Scripture, unless we know something about the God who effects what is recorded for us in Scripture. In other words, there must be a hermeneutical ( i.e. interpretive) dialogue between the text which confronts us (e.g., Gen...

On a spring day in 1747, twenty-nine-year-old David Brainerd rode horseback into the yard of a Northampton parsonage. It was the home of eminent New England pastor and theologian, Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah. Edwards and Brainerd, prior to this day, were relative strangers to one another,...

A nonconformist, unifier, husband of three deceased wives, victim of religious persecution, and author of what has been collected into six volumes of reprinted Works, John Flavel (c.1630-1691) of Dartmouth, England not only had an immense following during his own lifetime, but deeply influenced...