Christian Unity
"Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division," by Richard Lints: A Review
A few years ago, during a particularly contentious presidential election cycle, my father shared an article with me from a publication to which he subscribed and asked me to offer him my thoughts on the topic covered. [...]
Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. […]
The Lord’s Supper is a sign and seal of our mystical union with Jesus Christ. It is also a means by which Jesus unites the different members of his church into one body. […]
Spanish and Portuguese are close siblings. Both descended from Latin and developed alongside one another on the Iberian Peninsula in relative isolation from their closest European neighbors. Spanish and Portuguese thus have what linguists call a “high degree of mutual intelligibility.” […]
The following is transcribed from the White Horse Inn episode “Discussing Our Differences on the Lord’s Supper” (August 26, 2018). The roundtable participants are Michael Horton (Reformed), Justin Holcomb (Anglican), Steve Parks (Lutheran), and Jeremy Yong (Baptist). This excerpt is lightly edited for length and clarity. […]
The Marburg Colloquy (1529) may have been the best chance the Reformation ever had to reconcile the early German Lutheran and Swiss Reformed parties into a doctrinally unified Protestantism. […]
It often feels like the church is dividing along political lines. When we declare a church to be conservative or liberal, we are often not referring to theological stances (as J. Gresham Machen did in his classic Christianity and Liberalism), but to political ideology and cultural stances. Those who try to hold these parties together […]
We live in an age of denominations and distinctions, and many bemoan the seemingly constant influx of new denominations by way of church splits and schisms. The total number of Protestant denominations today varies based on who is doing the talking (and often based on their denominational affiliation as well!), but most estimates put it […]
The church is the crowning achievement in the work of salvation, planned by the Father, accomplished by the Son, and brought into reality by the Spirit (Eph. 1:3–14). The Father’s “plan for the fullness of time” is to sum up all things in heaven and earth under the headship of Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:10). This […]
We’re not Baptists yet. We still have a lot of questions.” The couple sitting across from me in the pastor’s study had been visiting our church so long that I had wrongly presumed they were already Baptists who were just new to the area. But over the course of our conversation, I discovered that these […]
As we approach the end of 2022, it seems appropriate to reminisce. Looking back, 2022 has been an exciting year for Modern Reformation. We’ve celebrated thirty years with a redesign of the print magazine and website, we’ve published some significant content—tackling tough but important issues in a spirit of humility and fidelity—and we’ve engaged in […]
Throughout the great ecclesial conflicts that troubled England during its civil wars and the Restoration, John Owen (1616–1683) set for himself the task of specifying the terms upon which the English church could unite groups such as the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, while also excluding such groups as the Catholics and Socinians. On one occasion, […]
In the summer of 1824, Samuel Miller, long-time professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, offered this counsel to students preparing for ministry: His words were meant to impress upon them the necessity of creeds and confessions for maintaining the unity, peace, and purity of the church. No church can hope to maintain a […]
Evangelicalism is no stranger to controversy. Debates over neo-Orthodoxy, the New Perspective on Paul, and Open Theism—to name only a few in the past half a century—have positioned evangelicals on the right side of controversy as they push back against attempts to abandon or modify major doctrines of the faith. However, recent debate over the […]
Tolerance, that oft-touted virtue of the Enlightenment, has of late been under duress. Not only have the rhetoric and practice of intolerance suffused our political discourse and society, but the quality, the character, and the very constitution of tolerance have been questioned, and not just by those who oppose it. As those entrenched against the […]
