Reformation21

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is serious about proclaiming Biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in the Church today. We go about that in very deliberate and (usually) very careful ways. We are always serious about how we handle those great truths of scripture! But...

Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church . Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014. x + 289pp. $21.99 The Kingdom of God has captured the attention and imagination of many recent evangelical writers. Even so, nothing resembling a theological consensus concerning...

With respect to my colleague, Mr Walker and his recent provocative post... Preparing to lecture recently, I came across these stirring words in some surprising places: 1. Christ is present in his word, since it is he himself who speaks when the holy Scriptures are read in the church. 2. It is the...

Since we completed our discussion of the "Ten Tenets" last month, I thought it might be useful to comment on some of the common objections to a Covenantal approach to apologetics. One of the most common objections against a "Covenantal" (or presuppositional) approach to apologetics is that it...

Since we completed our discussion of the "Ten Tenets" last month, I thought it might be useful to comment on some of the common objections to a Covenantal approach to apologetics. One of the most common objections against a "Covenantal" (or presuppositional) approach to apologetics is that it...

Is Paul also among the sacramentarians? When the Apostle uses a word six times in five verses, it is probably worthwhile to pay attention and ask what he is up to. This is what he does with the verb βαπτίζειν in 1 Corinthians 1:13-17. You can see the instances in bold below. 10 Παρακαλῶ δὲ ὑμᾶς,...

The two kingdoms. Few phrases so short could be lobbed with such devastating effect into a parlor conversation at a Reformed theology conference these days--or a few years ago, at any rate, though perhaps new topics have now succeeded it as the favorite bones of contention. For many in our circles...

In previous posts, I have suggested that the question of suffering before God needs to remain an open question - a question that we, along with the Psalmists, bring before God in the midst of our grief, anger, and confusion. All of this relates to prayer. But it also relates to action - action in a...

At the outset of the Anglican baptismal liturgy, an eighteenth-century rector would say "Dearly beloved, for as much as all men are conceived and born in sin. . .I beseech you to call upon God." Ask God, he urged, to show the infant mercy, and to make him part of the divine kingdom. Here the...

How can we avoid the extremes of monocausal fatalism, on the one hand, and open theism which insists that some events are "pointless" even to God, on the other? As I immersed myself in the Psalms after my cancer diagnosis, I came to see the value of the much-maligned "classical distinctions" in...