Inspiration & Inerrancy Of The Bible
For the first decade of my life, I worshiped in an independent Baptist church in Smyrna, Georgia. I owe much to that church. It is, after all, where I came to profess Christ as my Savior and was baptized. […]
Does the Augsburg Confession Teach Anything Outside of Scripture? "Defensio Augustanae Confessionis" (Chapter X)
by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester This edition of Balduin’s 1623 work Defensio Augustanae Confessionis (Wittenberg: Paul Helwigius, 1623; fols. G4v–H4v) was a response to Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S. J. (1570–1637) and his Hungarian polemic against Protestants titled Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz (Wien: Posonban, 1613); other editions Bratislava (1623 and 1637) and Trnava (1766). Pázmány devotes six […]
Roughly half of American Protestants and a majority of self-identified evangelicals currently reject at least a portion (and in some cases, nearly all) of the modern scientific consensus about the age of the earth and the evolutionary development of life. There are myriad biblical and theological issues involved—not to mention broader social, cultural, and political […]
A virtue of evangelicalism is its love and passion for the Bible. While it’s difficult to pin down what exactly evangelical means, cherishing the Bible almost always comes to mind.[1] But it’s not just evangelicals who should love the Bible. Christians—especially Reformed Christians—ought to love the Bible too. We ought to love it given its […]
Does the Augsburg Confession Teach Anything Outside of Scripture? "Defensio Augustanae Confessionis" (Chapter IX)
by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester In 1613, the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S.J. (1570–1637) published Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz. In Book 4 of this work, Pázmany devoted six chapters to a refutation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. In 1623, Lutheran theologian Friedrich Balduin published a direct response to Pázmany’s work, titled Defensio Augustanae […]
The executive editor of Modern Reformation, Joshua Schendel, recently talked with Dr. Michael Allen, who is the John Dyer Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Allen is the author of many articles and books, including Reformed Theology (T & T Clark, 2010) and, with his colleague Scott Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The […]
With dozens of books on the reliability of the Gospel accounts on the shelves, Can We Trust the Gospels?—by Tyndale House principal and Cambridge University lecturer Peter J. Williams—distinguishes itself by its mastery of materials, high accessibility, and relevance. Williams is a world-renowned expert on New Testament texts and manuscripts (debating to considerable effect the […]
The old proverb “God is in the details” means that it’s in the small and seemingly insignificant minutiae of an event that we see the truth and intent behind it. (This why graduate students painstakingly work their way through five-inch-thick books in the stacks of the university library!) There are certain details—the color of the […]
There once was a man who claimed to be in possession of a lost painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Upon hearing this claim, the curator of a prestigious museum asked him if it had ever been appraised. “No,” said the man. “No one outside my family has ever seen the portrait, but all of us […]
One of the first lessons you learn in Sunday school is that there are four Gospels—four different accounts of the life of Jesus. What we sometimes forget, however, is that only one of them, the Gospel of John, claims to be an eyewitness account. John’s recall of his participation in the ministry of Jesus, his […]
In recent decades, the ministry of preaching has thankfully been regaining its proper place in churches. After a long period of marginalization (and, in some cases, forfeiture) by the combined forces of liberal theology and secular communication theory, there is a resurgence in the primacy and power of the preached word during the divine service.1 […]
“Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography” by Michael R. Licona
Hard on the heels of Larry Hurtado’s outstanding Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World comes acclaimed apologist Michael Licona’s most significant publication to date, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? This singularly important book offers a powerful apologetic to New Testament skeptics, as well as a needed corrective to […]
Since Bart Ehrman, textual critic and former evangelical, has been issuing his broadsides at the notion of biblical inerrancy, two kinds of response have appeared on the American theological scene. On the one hand, it has been correctly noted that Ehrman does not give the benefit of the doubt to the best textual readings of […]
Like a diet promoter who gains fame by promising better results with fewer restrictions, Christian Smith has produced a stir in the evangelical publishing world by offering an understanding of scriptural authority that is supposedly both easier to maintain and more orthodox. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly […]
In the theology of Martin Luther, the Holy Spirit (contending for his position among other spirits) cannot be separated from the external Word in the fixed and stable form we know as the Holy Scriptures. These Holy Scriptures belong to a broader matrix of instruments through which the Holy Spirit deals with people mediately rather […]
