Movements
March/April 2022 I’m a new subscriber to Modern Reformation, and I would first of all like to thank you for this edifying Reformed theological journal. Second, I’m writing in response to “Evangelicals and the Evangel Future” by Michael Horton. While I feel the article is spot on with its assessment, I do have a suggestion. […]
In 2020, InterVarsity Academic Press published an anthology on the history of evangelical biblicism titled Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. For this issue, Blake Adams interviewed Dr. Timothy Larsen, the editor of Every Leaf, Line, and Letter. Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at […]
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 […]
The pandemic era has forced the world to undergo rapid changes. Some changes may be superficial, while others are much deeper, having become the “new normal” and reshaping the context in which theological education is carried out. How should seminaries particularly my institution, Aletheia Theological Seminary be doing their business, then? In The Odyssey, Homer […]
I was saddened by some of the conclusions of Daniel Treier’s article. He attributes the “rabid anti-Communism and (at best) indifference to racism” to “American pugnaciousness.” He repeats this charge by criticizing a “loss of proportion about Communism exacerbated a lack of perspective about racism” (62). First, conflating Communism with anti-racism is obscene. Yes, Communists have […]
January/February 2022 I would like to take issue with a point in George Marsden’s interesting and even enlightening article. When discussing the ways in which evangelicalism has incorporated political beliefs over the years, he points to the recent disagreements concerning mask mandates, stating: “It is hard to think of any principle in biblical ethics that […]
From early on, Christianity has been “a religion of the book.” Writing in the latter part of the second century, Irenaeus claimed: We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, […]
Invited to give a plenary address in Wittenberg on the weekend of the Reformation’s quincentenary (October 31, 2017), I took my teenage son on a tour of Martin Luther sites along the way. I’ll use this travelogue as a way of exploring what it means—or at least meant—to be an “evangelical.” *** We visited the […]
In the late 1520s, Martin Luther wrote a letter to Henry VIII of England in which he responded to the king’s charges of “detestable heresies.” Henry was particularly outraged by Luther’s notion of “evangelical liberty,” by which he thought Luther was calling for a freedom from all law. To Henry VIII, Luther was the “man […]
My spiritual pilgrimage offers one microcosm of American evangelicalism’s basic story arc: from mainline pietism through fundamentalism to both neo-evangelicalism and confessional Protestantism. I was born into mainline pietism as a Methodist in rural Ohio. But when the denomination began sending pastors to our congregation who did not believe and preach the Bible, we shifted […]
In October 2017, I was a newly minted PhD shopping a revised dissertation manuscript around to a handful of publishing houses. Not long after an evangelical house decided to take it on, I found out that my title—something involving the phrase “the evangelical mind”—would be the first part of the project to feel the editor’s […]
The answer to this question depends—not surprisingly—on what we mean by “fundamentalism.” As a religious designation, the term is just over a century old. Yet it never had just one meaning, and over the decades, these principal meanings have changed. So, to avoid confusion, we need to stay alert to these various meanings and be […]
In the very first “In this Issue” of Modern Reformation, Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton lamented that both popular culture and evangelicalism had pushed aside attentive and careful consideration of God, seeking instead entertainment, amusement, and fun. “So in this issue,” Dr. Horton wrote, “we will be raising thinking to the top of the agenda.” Indeed, not […]
To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center MovementBy Charles CothermanIVP Academic, 2020320 pages (hardcover), $35.00 Evangelicals are familiar with well-branded campus ministries such as Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ), InterVarsity, Navigators, and Veritas Forum that have played significant roles in shaping evangelical youth during their college years. Evangelicals […]
Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle over American EvangelicalismBy Brad VermurlenOxford University Press, 2020304 pages (hardcover), $99.00 What is the health of Reformed Protestantism, and how do you administer the physical exam? Brad Vermurlen’s new book on the New Calvinist Movement (hereafter NCM) answers this question by looking at the influence of […]
