The socially conservative evangelicals do not have a doctrine of a twofold kingdom; nor do they typically distinguish between nature and grace or between the sacred and the secular. Thus the only way they can cooperate with Roman Catholics on social questions is to get them converted and baptized. Continue reading →
God the Holy Spirit worked so powerfully among the apostles (Acts 5:12) that people came to think their ill would be healed if they were laid on cots so that the apostle Peter’s shadow fell on them (Acts 5:15). Through the apostles, . . . Continue reading →
The post-apostolic Christians understood what Jesus and Paul were teaching about the kingdom. They confessed universally, in the Rule of Faith, from the earliest decades of the second century, that God is “almighty” (omnipotens). They did battle with radical dualists, whether Gnostics . . . Continue reading →
One link led to another, and I happened recently upon the website of a large NAPARC congregation. As I often do, I looked to see who the pastor was. That link led me to a list of pastoral staff who coordinate a . . . Continue reading →
MacArthur is right to observe that too many evangelicals have no place for good works in their account of the faith. The question is not whether there is a “relationship between faith and works,” but rather what that relationship is.216 According to . . . Continue reading →
It is repeatedly argued (especially on social media) that unless one affirms that Christ exercises his dominion over all of life in the same way then one has denied Christ’s Lordship. Of course this way of arguing assumes what it has to . . . Continue reading →
Back in May 2007, Carl Trueman raised the problem of the pressures females feel in conservative evangelical and Reformed churches. This issue raises the question of how Reformed Christians ought to relate to the broader culture. How do we live in a . . . Continue reading →
The formal question of the Protestant Reformation was that of authority: What is the principal source of authority for the Christian faith and the Christian life? The Roman communion claimed that the church produced the Scriptures and thus the authority of the . . . Continue reading →
In volume three, where Owen begins his commentary proper on the text of Hebrews, he makes illuminating remarks on Hebrews 3:1–2, about how he understood the movement of redemptive history and the comparison and contrast that Paul makes in Hebrews between Moses . . . Continue reading →
We live in the desert. It is not the sort of cactus-filled desert where Snoopy’s brother Spike lives (that is east of us a few hours) but it is desert nonetheless. That means water is at a premium and people respond by . . . Continue reading →
Between 1513 and 1519, as he lectured through the Psalms, Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, and the Psalms again at the University in Wittenberg, Martin Luther (1483–1546) not only became an Augustinian anti-Pelagian in soteriology (sola gratia); in that same period he also recovered . . . Continue reading →
In a brief episode of the Heidelcast, I offered five or six points about the controversy over the placement of a Satanist altar in the Iowa state capitol, its destruction, and how Christians ought to think about the controversy.1 In the ensuing . . . Continue reading →
Happy New Year from the HRA! This is the sixteenth year of the Heidelblog. You downloaded posts and pages more than 1.4 million times this year. The number of visitors grew by 9%, which means that more visitors came to the Heidelblog . . . Continue reading →
During the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” However important that question was in the politics of 1973, it remains an important question in theology today. A friend writes to ask . . . Continue reading →
The definition of plagiarism is well established, but for the sake of completeness, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “The action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; literary theft.”1 It has been used . . . Continue reading →
As a young boy I certainly believed in Santa. We made the annual cookie oblation and went to bed under the conditional covenant that he would not come if we did not sleep (or at least stay in bed). Nevertheless, I think I . . . Continue reading →
It is a small thing—so small that it might go unnoticed—but as in Exercitation VI, in Exercitation XIX where Owen considered the “State and Ordinances of the Church Before the Giving of the Law,” he consistently spoke of the “Jewish church.”1 To . . . Continue reading →
One of the recurring questions I get is about the meaning of body in 1 Corinthians 11:28. The question is whether “discerning the body” in Paul’s narrative refers to “being cognizant of the congregation” or to discerning Christ’s physical, actual body and blood, . . . Continue reading →
“Most of the current controversy regarding the gospel hinges on the definitions of a few key words, including repentance, faith, discipleship, and Lord.”186 So writes John MacArthur in his chapter on repentance.187 He notes that our Lord’s preaching of the Kingdom of . . . Continue reading →
In his exercitation on “the oneness of the church” Owen argued seven points. Each and all of them were in the service of what Reformed theology calls the unity of the covenant of grace. For Owen and the mainstream of Reformed orthodoxy, . . . Continue reading →