Every presidential election cycle produces a fresh round of vitriolic debate regarding the role of conservative Christians in the political process. In a few short decades, evangelicals have been transformed from politically indifferent separatists to one of the most controversial political constituencies in America. As one who has contributed to the debate over religion and […]
Two eschatologies, or views of history and creation’s destiny, clashed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. One was rooted in the triumphalism that marked Anglo-American Protestantism since the Spanish Armada’s defeat in 1588 and produced the courageous confidence of the New England Puritans. The other was rooted in the disillusionment with society’s gradual […]
Largely written in response to the charge that Rome was being destroyed by the barbarians because the former had just officially embraced Christianity, the Bishop of Hippo (a city in northern Africa) responded with his classic, The City of God. In that work, Augustine (354-430) announced that he had hereby “taken upon myself the task […]
It is difficult for American Christians today, long accustomed to the political benefits of liberal democracy, to imagine what it was like to live in a time when religious freedom was not taken for granted. The concept of the separation of Church and state was a radical idea in the seventeenth century, and it is […]
Investigating the nature of the kingdom of God means that one must come to grips with the nature of the world outside the kingdom. How Christians evaluate the spiritual status of non-Christian cultures and religions inevitably shapes their understanding of the Church, the Gospel, evangelism, and cultural engagement. A recent Roman Catholic address directly addressing […]
Christians everywhere are called to battle the forces of evil in this world. Understanding biblical teaching on God's Kingdom should be a powerful weapon in this battle against evil. The Bible's Kingdom Vision The four gospels mention the Church (Ekklesia) only twice (Matt. 16:18 and 18:17), but they mention the Kingdom (Basileia) 125 times. Jesus […]
Liberalism's Dissatisfaction with the Institutional Church For a long time … [in modernist theology, the] character of the kingdom of heaven was supposed to be incompatible with the idea of the ekklesia [the institutional church]. Thus, e.g., the liberal theology asserted that, as a visible gathering of believers with a certain amount of organization, the […]
As this issue's Letters to the Editor section readily testifies, our May/June issue on the dangers of seeker-driven (as opposed to theologically-driven) congregational outreach-"The Malling of Mission: How Suburban Values Control the Church Growth Movement"-raised the hair on the necks of more than a few readers. Some of the most interesting conversation this debate sparked […]
In spite of the flurry of new books on C. S. Lewis, few volumes offer really new insights and succeed in showing the relevance of Lewis's ideas for the issues that face Christians today. David Mills's fine collection is one of these rare exceptions. The focus of Mills's book is witness. It is divided into […]
As Jaroslav Pelikan observes in his foreword to this very fine volume, "[T]here are certain figures in the history of thought who are themselves an encyclopedia … and whose writings, therefore, both by their profundity and by their total mass, seem to require encyclopedic treatment" and, "[m]easured by any criterion, whether volume of literary output […]
From 1952 to 1955, the great London preacher Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones delivered a series of lectures on biblical doctrines every Friday evening in Westminster Chapel. The tapes of these lectures are still by far the most requested of all those distributed through the Martyn Lloyd-Jones Recordings Trust. This series of volumes, now complete, are edited […]
In The Hand of God, pastor and Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals council member Alistair Begg surveys the life of Joseph, the hero of the faith in whose life the biblical doctrine of providence finds its classic Old Testament expression. Joseph, Begg contends, was a radically God-centered individual whose journey from the fields of Canaan to […]
