To question conversion is not the same thing as favoring dead orthodoxy or nominalism. A middle position may actually exist between my original essay, "The Evangelical Narrative: Getting Rid of the Church" (Modern Reformation, November/December 2008), and Donald T. Williams' gracious response, "Getting Rid of Conversion?" That position answers one of Williams' concluding questions with […]
White Horse Inn host Michael Horton recently spoke with Jim Belcher. He is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, and author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emergent and Traditional (IVP, 2009). Why did you write this book and what were the experiences behind it?In the mid-1990s when I was doing […]
Of all the literary put downs aimed at Calvinism, H. L. Mencken's was arguably the best. Of course, Mark Twain's rendition of Calvinist preaching and Sabbatarian severity in The Adventures of Huck Finn captured well the defect that has tarnished John Calvin's reputation ever since his birth a half millennium ago. According to Huck's description […]
Fyodor Dostoevsky has been hailed by many scholars as one of the most brilliant and important novelists of all time. His two most famous novels, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, are routinely required reading in many high schools and universities across the United States. He also happens to have been a devoted Christian. […]
Long before Jack Kerouac, there was John Calvin. According to the Genevan Reformer, the Christian life was a sojourn, and we are always on the road. The metaphor of pilgrimage serves as a distinguishing feature of this fine new biography by Herman Selderhuis (church historian at the Theologische Universiteit Apeldoorn in the Netherlands). Calvin was […]
When Marilynne Robinson came to Philadelphia's Free Library last fall to read from her new novel, Home, she drew a crowd of loyalists. The auditorium wasn't completely packed– she was competing that night with the last of the televised presidential debates. It seemed a fitting juxtaposition, given that Robinson prefers to write about small town […]
Oh, children, Zion train is comin' our way; get on board now! They said the Zion train is comin' our way; You got a ticket, so thank the Lord! Zion's train is-Zion's train is-Zion's train is-Zion's train- They said the soul train is coming our way; They said the soul train is coming our way. […]
Epilogue The Calvinist view of liberty, wherever it spread, gave citizens confidence and protections. Within a century, the American colonies would exhibit these Calvinistic distinctives. Not incidentally, one of the first colonial law codes was named “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties.” So close were law and liberty that Calvin’s disciples customarily associated law codes with […]
On a cold November day in 1095, Pope Urban II roused the great crowd assembled before him to take up the cause of holy war against Islam. Instead of fighting each other, the people were told to unite against the common enemy and retake the Holy Land. "If you must have blood," he exhorted, "bathe […]
In the context of the clash of European empires for the American colonies, Presbyterian preacher Samuel Davies (1723-61) turned the colonists’ attention to Christ’s kingdom as “the best refuge from this boisterous world” of violence and domination.1 “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said, as much as to say, “I do not deny […]
There’s a not-so-subtle irony in the fact that our education system promotes the idea to our nation’s young people that they are little more than highly evolved animals, and then, when little Johnny grows up and behaves like one, we conclude that his real problem is his lack of education. The idea that man is […]
When an alien spaceship destroyed the White House in the 1993 science fiction film Independence Day, I’m told that pre-9/11 moviegoers were not horrified at the possibility and that some even cheered (perhaps because they were a bit cynical about the current occupant of the Oval Office). As the world’s lone superpower, we believe there […]
