The Nature Of The Church
“Reclaiming the Reformation: Christ for You in Community,” by Magnus Persson, translated by Bror Erickson
*** 1517 Publishing | 2021 | 224 pages (paperback) | $21.85 Magnus Persson, a successful pastor in the charismatic church for many years, is now a minister in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church. How did that happen? In Reclaiming the Reformation, Persson answers that question en route to offering a larger call to reformational Christianity. […]
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 […]
Late in 1538, Martin Luther wrote to his Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon. He had just finished reading Melanchthon’s latest manuscript, On the Authority of the Church and the Writings of the Ancient Fathers, which would be published in 1539. As he thumbed through it, he told Melanchthon that his head swirled with thoughts of Aristotle […]
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 […]
Playwright Eugene O’Neill, who was reared on the road by actor/parents who were performing in various cities, lamented of his unstable life: “I was born in a hotel room and God-damn, I’ll die in a hotel room.” While O’Neill turned his tortured experience into great art, including the memorable Long Day’s Journey into Night, he […]
In the aftermath of World War I, and during the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats wrote the now nearly ubiquitous line, Things fall apart the center cannot hold. Borrowing imagery from Christian apocalyptic writings, Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” conveys the sense of overwhelming disaster. Things are not just different. They are disintegrating. […]
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 […]
What a year 2020 has proven to be. Such “normal” issues that American evangelicals have had to face over the last half century or so—moral decline attended by the subsequent propagation of naive utopian solutions, increasing political polarity, a diminishing public square, social fragmentation, a deteriorating educational system, rising fear and anxiety—seem to have wildly […]
I think about missions a lot. I am a pastor and a missionary, and I serve on a missions committee for a church I do not pastor. I think about it every day. I have been a Christian a lot longer: forty-six years. When I started reading the Bible back in 1973, something began to […]
Michael Horton and the WHI Team are launching an exciting new column in Modern Reformation. Our prayer is that this new feature encourages all of us as we see Christ building his church around the world, a church against which the gates of hell shall never prevail (Matt. 16:18). This new initiative invites our brother […]
I recently noticed a statement by leadership guru Seth Goden, who said that one of the things that best prepared children in the late twentieth century for life was “sea monkeys.” Do you remember the old comic books with advertisements for sea monkeys and how the pictures depicted these sea monkeys as majestic-looking characters, with […]
White Horse Inn radio cohost Michael Horton interviewed Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, former religion editor of United Press International, international columnist, and Lutheran lay theologian. He is also a Senior Distinguished Fellow of 1517 The Legacy Project. WHI: Please tell us the story about how you came back to your Lutheran upbringing. US-N: This was in […]
Marco Polo describes a hidden city, Berenice, to his host and captor Kublai Khan.1 It is really two cities, one above and another hidden from view, “behind the shops and under the stairs.” Evangelical Protestant missions is like that. There is a world you can easily see of structures, conferences, how-to manuals, and endless debates. […]
Every Sunday, Christians around the world confess their belief in “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” in the words of the Nicene Creed. The irony, of course, is that the church doesn’t look united, is often beset by scandal, seems ever fragmented into competing interest groups, and often rejects what the apostles explicitly commanded. How […]
