"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a world without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." In this famous and more than slightly scolding description of Protestant liberalism in the 1950s, Yale's H. Richard Niebuhr actually put his finger on the perennial heresy of the human heart since humanity's […]
Long before George H. W. Bush spoke of a kinder, gentler America-almost fifty years before to be exact-American evangelicals had tried to fashion a less abrasive and more affirming version of their faith. The year was 1924 and a variety of fundamentalists assembled to put aside acrimony and mudslinging, and to put forward a positive […]
As Modern Reformation celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, the editors have been considering what lies ahead for this publication. How should we purposefully plan for anniversaries yet to come? To do that, we're looking both to real history and to the real challenges that lie ahead to fix a bearing for the publication. Doing so ensures […]
Few pursuits in life are more important than the pursuit of truth. What one believes to be true, especially about God, humanity, and the relation between them, will govern one's entire life-thoughts, affections, attitudes, actions, desires, and decisions. Most importantly, one cannot worship God rightly without right knowledge about who God is. Truth serves as […]
Martin Luther (1483-1546) Luther is credited as the founder of the German Reformation. Luther's study of the writings of the Apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo led him to the belief that men and women could only be justified by the grace of God, through faith rather than through good works or religious observances. Luther's […]
In 1992, Modern Reformation magazine first appeared as a monthly, glossy magazine after existing as a quarterly newsletter for six years. That year, it competed for the attention span of readers with the likes of the Rodney King beating, a new audio format gaining in popularity called "compact discs," and something called the World Wide […]
Dr. Peterson, it's an honor to have you with us. You've written a lot on the Christian life. What do you know about the Christian life now that you didn't know when you first became a pastor?Well, it's not a matter of knowing more things as much as it is getting a feel for the […]
David Wells's No Place for Truth may have been the most important book about Evangelicalism published in the 1990s. For instance, reading it influenced James Montgomery Boice and played a part in the formation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and later the signers of the Cambridge Declaration (1996). In No Place for Truth, Wells […]
The current controversy over the doctrine of justification touches upon several interrelated questions beginning with the nature of Judaism as the Apostle Paul experienced it, covenant theology, and the doctrine of justification. These questions and particularly the doctrine of justification are at the heart of historic Protestant theology and piety. Beginning with the work of […]
I was enticed to read this book on account of its title, or even more so, its subtitle. Before I acquired the book I pondered the subtitle and how I might respond. I imagined Wetterling's focus would be on law verses like "No thief shall enter the kingdom of heaven." Does Scripture mean this when […]
"I know that it is pretty much an old saw that images are the books of the uneducated… But … the prophets totally condemn the notion, taken as axiomatic by the papists, that images stand in place of books." (Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 11, Section 5) With these words, John Calvin expresses what has been […]
Satire is alive and well. For every person who has ever cringed at boxes of "Christian" breath mints or "Christian" perfume at the checkout counter of the local Christian bookstore, here is a writer who understands your pain. Like his fake news website LarkNews.com, aimed at evangelicals and their trends, editor Joel Kilpatrick brings us […]
