"What's the big deal?" I hear that a lot as a Council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Why are we harping so much on the doctrine of justification? What's at stake and why are we so nitpicky about it? Well, good question. Of course, we are not the first to "harp" on this […]
How is the doctrine of justification faring in our day? Historically, of course, the reformers ap-proached it with the utmost seriousness. For example, consider the impassioned plea of Martin Luther written in the preface to his Forty-Five Theses drawn up in 1537: "The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, […]
E. P. Sanders mistakes the semi-Pelagianism of Second Temple Judaism for Pelagianism pure and simple, and thus misunderstands Luther's critique of the Roman Catholic Church as well as his grasp of Paul. Sanders is reacting to something that doesn't exist. He has, therefore, founded a movement with an illusory raison d'etre! Let me explain: Sanders […]
The New Perspective on Paul, as it has been called, raises serious questions for Protestants committed to the doctrine of justification by faith. This school of thought does so in two ways. On the one hand, it questions the Apostle Paul's relationship to-and understanding of-Judaism. On the other hand, it undermines the Reformation's understanding of […]
In reading the literature of the New Perspective carefully, we see several glaring weaknesses that deserve attention. One of the catchphrases of the New Perspective is "solution to plight." The proponents believe that Paul underwent an experience on the road to Damascus that took place apart from any supposed inner struggle that we expect he […]
It is a difficult and perhaps even a dangerous task to take a single doctrine from the body of Christian theology and isolate it. You have to ensure that the doctrine being extracted and examined is not given a life independent of the body from which it is taken. In other words, care must be […]
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand." (Rom. 5:1-2) After Paul has presented his most detailed discussion of justification in Romans 3 and 4, he concludes that we […]
Another catchphrase of the New Perspective is "boundary markers." If Christianity were not about the Law in any fundamental sense, insofar as Judaism presented the Law in more benign terms than Christians thought it did prior to our time, then it was about the Law in a penultimate and less deep-reaching way. The real issue […]
Books are never written in a vacuum, and the context of both author and audience often determines the interest that a book generates and the reception it receives. In the case of Norman Shepherd's The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation and Evangelism, the context can hardly be ignored. Shepherd was involved in […]
Readers of Modern Reformation certainly will be interested in any book that sets forth Paul's doctrine of justification and its relationship to the Law of God. This is especially true when such a study is conducted in light of the challenges raised to traditional Pro-testant formulations of this critical doctrine by proponents of the so-called […]
