From early on, Christianity has been “a religion of the book.” Writing in the latter part of the second century, Irenaeus claimed: We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, […]
January/February 2022 I would like to take issue with a point in George Marsden’s interesting and even enlightening article. When discussing the ways in which evangelicalism has incorporated political beliefs over the years, he points to the recent disagreements concerning mask mandates, stating: “It is hard to think of any principle in biblical ethics that […]
I was saddened by some of the conclusions of Daniel Treier’s article. He attributes the “rabid anti-Communism and (at best) indifference to racism” to “American pugnaciousness.” He repeats this charge by criticizing a “loss of proportion about Communism exacerbated a lack of perspective about racism” (62). First, conflating Communism with anti-racism is obscene. Yes, Communists have […]
On a recent trip to London, I visited the churches where John Newton, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Charles Spurgeon once preached, which prompted me to reflect on the state of preaching today. It seems to me that preaching in evangelical churches is in decline across the English-speaking world. Although there are bright spots here and there, […]
The pandemic era has forced the world to undergo rapid changes. Some changes may be superficial, while others are much deeper, having become the “new normal” and reshaping the context in which theological education is carried out. How should seminaries particularly my institution, Aletheia Theological Seminary be doing their business, then? In The Odyssey, Homer […]
by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester In 1613, the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S.J. (1570–1637) published Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz. In Book 4 of this work, Pázmany devoted six chapters to a refutation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. In 1623, Lutheran theologian Friedrich Balduin published a direct response to Pázmany’s work, titled Defensio Augustanae […]
The best stories come from boats. Tales of threatening gale winds and thousand-pound tunas are never blasé. Yet old fishermen are not on their oath when they reminisce about the weather they fought or the fish they caught in their youth. The annals of early modern Protestantism are also filled with stories—both striking and true—of […]
The sun is high, the land brilliant and beautiful this morning as I tend the flock, the whole camp behind me, the land before, the burning heat upon me. The sheep are grazing, and awful thoughts consume me; thoughts of the glory I left behind, of the majesty of the city I grew up in. […]
A virtue of evangelicalism is its love and passion for the Bible. While it’s difficult to pin down what exactly evangelical means, cherishing the Bible almost always comes to mind.[1] But it’s not just evangelicals who should love the Bible. Christians—especially Reformed Christians—ought to love the Bible too. We ought to love it given its […]
In 2020, InterVarsity Academic Press published an anthology on the history of evangelical biblicism titled Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. For this issue, Blake Adams interviewed Dr. Timothy Larsen, the editor of Every Leaf, Line, and Letter. Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at […]
Little chest red and naked Rising with powerful breath. Eyes seeing forever on. The world is birthed anew. Ears once deaf in pink sleep. Your dreams in warm silence are done. Welcome this fresh world of music. Your life, newborn boy, has begun. Your world was flesh and light. The stethoscope was your first cold. […]
Some of my earliest impressions of Eve were shaped by C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the world of Narnia, to be a “daughter of Eve” is simply to be human—not centaur or dwarf, fawn or talking animal. But to descend from Eve is also to have a royal destiny, […]
