Review: Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States By Walter R. Strickland

The earliest church experience I remember was in my hometown of Shreveport, LA. My mother made sure my brothers and I were dressed in our “Sunday best,” then loaded us into the car and drove us to a small white church building that could not have held more than sixty people. Continue reading →

Thirty Million

. . . By the estimation of leading religious demographers, over thirty million Christians perished under atheist regimes in the twentieth century. Tell this to friends who might insouciantly associate “secularism” with deliverance from religious violence. Tell this, too, to American history . . . Continue reading →

We’ve Been Dating It All Wrong: Richard Denton And The Arrival of American Presbyterianism

Pre-1700’s Presbyterianism in America is shrouded in mystique. Some would say it did not really exist since there was no formal Presbytery established until 1706. Too often it is made to appear that Presbyterianism suddenly dropped into the colonies out of nowhere, . . . Continue reading →

Small Is Beautiful

If Google is a reliable search engine, the anniversary of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on June 11 passed without any mention by the press. The reasons are not hard to fathom. The OPC is small, and it lacks a celebrity. In an . . . Continue reading →

What The Dying Of The PCUSA Means

PCUSA Logo

When, Dean Kelley published Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), the Protestant mainline was already in crisis. They were shrinking, and, as Kelley’s title suggests, the “conservative” churches were growing. This book was published the year before . . . Continue reading →

What’s In A Denominational Name?

Today, neither the Orthodox Presbyterian Church nor the Presbyterian Church in America bear their first chosen names. Different as the two denominations are, the reasons for their name changes and even their slates of rejected names are quite similar. And the names—those . . . Continue reading →

Three Things Dispensational Apologists Should Stop Saying

Introduction There are varieties of Dispensationalism, e.g., classic (Darby, Scofield), modified (Chafer, Ryrie), and progressive (Bock, Blaising). To be sure there are varieties of covenant theology, e.g., classic e.g., that taught in the classical period that taught the covenant of redemption (pactum . . . Continue reading →

Presbyterians And Presbyterians Together: A Call To Charitable Theological Discourse

NOTE: This document is posted here for historical interest and research only. This document was published in April, 2006  and provoked considerable discussion in conservative Presbyterian and Reformed world in connection to the Federal Vision controversy. Since that time the original publication . . . Continue reading →

The Presbyterian Controversy: A Review

Bradley Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). This review was published originally in a slightly different form in The Reformed Herald in 1993. It was written for the Reformed Church in the U.S. which publishes the . . . Continue reading →