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When I used to lead women’s ministry at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, I helped organize our yearly Women’s Retreats. The men, however, never had Men’s Retreats. They had Men’s Advances. Retreats, as they saw it, were for sissies. Nevermind that the larger church adopted the concept of retreat from Jesus’s example in the Gospels. […]
Reformed Systematic Theology will be a total of four volumes that plans to summarize the historical theology of the Reformed tradition “an accessible and comprehensive approach that is biblical, doctrinal, experiential, and practical.” Recognizing Christian theology as a system of about eight major loci, this first volume explores the first two: prolegomena, the doctrine of […]
I don’t know for sure if pastors complain more than anyone else, but from personal experience I will admit that a pastor is often tempted to grumble. He may be inclined to complain about the long hours every week spent preparing edifying sermons, about the loneliness of leadership in these trying times, or about cranky […]
I recently posted a question on Facebook: “If you saw the term ‘apatheism,’ what would it bring to mind?” Without knowing the definition of this relatively novel term, many commenters suggested it had to do with apathy toward God. When the title of your book invokes something familiar but unexplored in the public imagination, you […]
Joshua Pauling (JP): Thank you, Jeff, for agreeing to discuss your new book, Reading the Times: a Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News. To start, the book has an interesting origin—what was the impetus for writing the book? Jeffrey Bilbro (JB): This is somewhat ironic, but as I acknowledge in the preface, the catalyst […]
If you’ve ever found yourself straying into the distinctive online realm that is Weird Christian Twitter, sooner or later you’ll come to the conclusion that “Very Online” Lutherans are a pretty scarce bunch. It’s not hard to come across Catholics arguing over the possibility of distributism and the merits of Francisco Franco, “1689er” Reformed Baptists […]
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Jordan Peterson For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. Augustine When Aeneas first lands in Carthage after […]
Recounted in part 2 was the close, coordinate relationship between the “Two Twinnes” of church and state in seventeenth century Massachusetts. “In the Cambridge Platform [1648] the clergy claimed the support of the civil power as fully as ever the Jewish priesthood did,” wrote Herbert Osgood. Per the Platform, “The power and authority of magistrates […]
In the previous essay, I introduced the problem of divine absence. That is, why does God, who should presumably be obvious, seem so much less obvious than we might hope for Him to be? Or recalling Taylor’s set-up, why is it that it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 AD, and […]
Given what we’re seeing in churches across the country, it seems that many who claim the name of Christ are spoiling for a fight. Are these fights being waged for the truth of the Gospel? Or the authority of Scripture? Or a host of other biblical doctrines that either lie at or near the heart […]
It’s no secret that as the COVID pandemic dragged on for more than a year, it proved rough for many churches. Many saw members leave and shop around. This was lamented by local pastors and decried in articles nationally. One article I found helpful echoed that the pandemic and “the politicization of everything,” coupled with […]
In my last post, I explained some of the basic assumptions and reasons for the infra- and supralapsarian debates in the early modern period. In this post I want to give a primer on one of those basic assumptions, namely the treatment of the doctrine of predestination and reprobation in the early modern period. Predestination […]
