I still remember my first experience in a Pentecostal worship service. Growing up in a ‘frozen chosen’ Dutch Reformed church, it was quite the culture shock. I was a Calvinist in exile at a Pentecostal university (a long story). As the music started to grow loud, the lights grew dim, and voices were raised along […]
Monday, 19 December, 2022 by Levi Bakerink
In 1930, amid growing tensions within the church over the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen published a short work titled The Virgin Birth of Christ. He sought to defend the biblical account of Christ’s miraculous birth against those who not only questioned its historicity but denied its importance as a “fundamental” […]
Monday, 08 August, 2022 by Levi Bakerink
Jerusalem is under attack. Israel, its sister kingdom to the north has already been exiled (722 BC), and now Judah faces the same fate. In 605, the third year of King Jehoiakim (ca. 609-597 BC), the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and started the first of many deportations to Babylon (Daniel 1:1). Daniel and his […]
Monday, 20 December, 2021 by Levi Bakerink
What happens on Sunday affects the rest of the week; or at least, it should. Too often, however, the doctrine of vocation and ‘all-of-life’ worship is little more than a theological exercise, lacking any practical application to workers’ lives. This divorce between Sunday worship and the workweek is what authors Kaemingk and Willson seek to […]
Wednesday, 10 March, 2021 by Levi Bakerink
One of the most contentious debates in recent years has been between the proponents of the so called New Perspective on Paul, and those within the more traditional view.[1] And understandably so, considering the Christian doctrines at stake in the discussion, not least of which is justification by faith alone. Is there any way to […]
Thursday, 06 August, 2020 by Levi Bakerink