Reformation21

I thank Kevin for his kind personal references, and for his lengthy response to my piece. But it doesn't get to the point, does it? Of course Kevin is not to be tarred with the brushes of Franke, Grenz and Murphy. Each has his or her own theological picture to paint. Nevertheless they and Kevin ,...

I've been reading just about everything Paul Helm writes with great enthusiasm since I first encountered his The Varieties of Belief (1973) during my days as an undergraduate. Moreover, I almost always find myself agreeing with him, even when he champions positions that are no longer popular (e.g...

American President Theodore Roosevelt once said that "it is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and...

In recent times Charles Hodge has come in for a drubbing in connection with his remarks on the nature of what he calls theological science, as these are set out in the first seventeen pages of his Systematic Theology. (See, for example, Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How...

This past week, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, kissed a seven year old boy--on the stomach! Context: the President had bent down to ask the boy his name; the boy in embarrassment rolled up his T-shirt over his face thereby exposing his stomach; what else was a politician to do? Almost...

Waiting for a flight to Philadelphia in Heathrow Terminal 4 recently, I engaged in my usual ritual: buying my children copies of the Beano and the Dandy comics, and some chocolate that tastes like real chocolate (seemingly illegal in the USA), and finding a present for my wife. A couple of years...

One of the questions I have been asked with some frequency over the last month or so is why my contributions to the Reformation 21 blog tend to have something of a facetious edge to them. I am tempted to answer simply that that is the kind of person I am. If you want a bland blog, there are plenty...

70s rock behemoth, Led Zeppelin had no greater track than Stairway to Heaven . Indeed, so secure is its position at the apex of rock music that many radio polls on the greatest rock music of all time frequently exclude it from consideration simply because the battle is really for second place. In...

Returning home late one night in the early summer, I found that my van's transmission had died. Fortunately, it happened on my driveway; unfortunately I needed to be at the airport at 6am the following morning, which meant that I was placed almost permanently in the debt of the colleague who kindly...

Teaching history is probably one of the more depressing activities in which one can engage in the current climate. At an academic level, the discipline has been in self-destruct mode for some time, losing itself in a morass of hyperspecialised narratives, nihilistic epistemologies and general...