What would things look like if Satan actually took over a city? The first frames in our imaginative slide show probably depict mayhem on a massive scale: Widespread violence, deviant sexualities, pornography in every vending machine, churches closed down and worshipers dragged off to City Hall. Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of […]
Scott Oliphint's Reasons for Faith is an attempt to address several of the problems in contemporary philosophy of religion and demonstrate that "Reformed thought, centrally set forth in [Cornelius] Van Til's works… has already broached virtually every discussion now in play." His perspective is broader, though, than simply Van Til (in fact, Van Til is […]
In this first volume of his guide to the Westminster Confession, R.C. Sproul provides an excellent introduction to the Reformed faith by leading us through the Confession, which remains unsurpassed "in eloquence, grandeur, and theological accuracy" (p. viii). He explains the theology of its first eight chapters with a clarity and vigor that is not […]
As the proverbial saying has it, "Well begun is half done." Graeme Goldsworthy seems to have followed that maxim when he set out to write his textbook on hermeneutics. First off, he dedicated it to his mentor, Alan Cole, who, among other things, had an "irrepressible Irish humor." While I often ignore dedications and prefaces, […]
For six weeks every spring, masses of Grus canadensis, Sandhill Cranes-known to Native Americans as "echo makers" because their calls carry for miles-migrate to the Platte River in Nebraska. Calling to their mates, they soar in on six-foot wingspans and settle like an endless carpet over the marsh. Against this ecological backdrop plays the drama […]
“Jesus Christ is Lord” has been and continues to be the conviction of the Christian. It is this conviction that has enabled men and women of every century, including our own, to face persecution and death rather than renounce the faith of Jesus Christ. This earliest and simplest of Christian confessions focuses attention upon the […]
The Bible's variety is mind-boggling. It contains sixty-six documents, composed over one and a half millennia in three languages. Some biblical books are addressed to an oppressed Ancient Near Eastern clan, recently rescued from slavery; others, to agrarian communities of farmers and craftsmen; still others, to multiethnic urban cells around the Mediterranean Sea, groups that […]
The conventional account-at least the one this writer encounters most often-is that in Gethsemane Jesus demonstrates his humanity, by shrinking (as any of us would) from the painful death ahead of him. Jesus is deeply distressed by the prospect not only of dying but of being killed in a cruel and violent manner. He knows […]
The question of who Jesus was in world history and what he was really like can be unnerving for Christians. What if the view we have of him, as all-compassionate, universally and inclusively loving, embracing of every single sort of sufferer, the epitome of kindness and gentleness, were not a true one? What if the […]
Marriage is the union between a man and a woman where the two individuals become one flesh, as the Apostle Paul tells us in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. The marital union, however, is a relationship that points to the greater relationship between Christ and the church. Typically, Reformed theologians have described the relationship between […]
At the heart of the Christian story is the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. How his followers understand that story is what separates us into the many different expressions of faith that can be found today. The significance of Christ's atonement for sins (the very basis of his name and his […]
