Recently I had opportunity to engage in a friendly dialogue with some Baptist academics over the merits of the project proposed in Recovering the Reformed Confession. That project is, as they say, wending through the publication process. Because of space limitations I was unable to do a couple of things, namely, to engage more fully with some of the texts and approaches to Baptist covenant theology (as distinct from Reformed covenant theology). Continue reading →
…in this book Dolezal argues that a number of contemporary evangelical and Reformed theologians, whether wittingly or unwittingly, have rejected and/or wrongly redefined elements of classical Christian theism. In other words, they have rejected and/or wrongly redefined elements of the Christian doctrine . . . Continue reading →
Readers of this space frequently ask, “What do Reformed Christians believe about x?” It really does not matter what x is. It might be predestination (it frequently is) or it might be baptism (it is frequently is) or it might be about . . . Continue reading →
This question comes over the transom regularly. I think most confessional Reformed pastors would probably say that, though they disagree strongly with Arminianism, it is not heresy. Somewhere I read (or heard) that William Ames (1576–1633), who served as an advisor . . . Continue reading →
Trevin Wax and David Fitch have been in a dialogue in which each of them has published a post expressing appreciation for the other’s tradition. Wax identifies as Reformed and Fitch as Anabaptist. The reader can draw his own conclusions as to . . . Continue reading →
I am not certain what it means but pastors resort to military analogies with surprising frequency. One of them is the metaphor of “dying on a hill.” The image is that of a marine charging up a hill or fighting to hold . . . Continue reading →
We don’t call ourselves Reformed Baptists because we reserve the word Reformed for people who are actually Reformed.” “Chuck Finney” (A Baptist Minister) on Presbycast episode 13 “Undead Unificating”
I was listening to a podcast recently in which someone remarked that Reformed churches can be “cold.” In my first pastorate I had an elder who used to joke that, in the days before refrigeration, “they used to build the Reformed church . . . Continue reading →
What happens is that contemporary evangelical and charismatic folk describe ordinary phenomena in extraordinary, apostolic terms. They identify non-apostolic phenomena as apostolic. That is cheating but it is rhetorically powerful and persuasive. Many evangelicals do not want to live in the post-canonical, in between time. It is a drag. People want a power religion. Judged against the neo-Pentecostal and charismatic claims, Reformed Christianity seems decidedly weak and powerless (see all of 2 Corinthians). Continue reading →
And we must note these three degrees, that the promise was first made to the Jews, and then to their children, and last of all, that it is also to be imparted to the Gentiles. We know the reason why the Jews . . . Continue reading →
There are a number of evangelical people who are questioning the broadly evangelical theology, piety, and practice (whether Dispensational or Pentecostal or both) they inherited. For them covenant is a new category and they are working through the implications of the history of redemption . . . Continue reading →
Introduction Since the early 19th century American Christianity has been largely dominated by a revival of the original Anabaptist theology, piety, and practice. One can transpose much of what took place in the 19th century over the first generation Anabaptists (1520s) and . . . Continue reading →
Les and Tanner host the popular Reformed Pubcast and they decided to put the whole enterprise at risk once again by including me in episode 103. We discussed, among other things, the definition of the adjective Reformed and the nature and role . . . Continue reading →
J. I. Packer is a significant figure in a variety of circles. He is one of the last voices representing that generation of British evangelicalism that had roots in the Reformation, that was articulate, warm, and evangelical in the best sense of . . . Continue reading →
France. As may be gathered from the above account, the influence of Amyraut was constantly on the increase between 1637 and 1659. At first, only a few provinces and the Church of Paris supported him, and there was resolute opposition in many . . . Continue reading →
In 1641, Amyraut took the pen to defend Calvin’s view of reprobation, which had been severely criticized in an anonymous work. In this volume, titled Doctrinae J. Calvini de Absoluto Reprobationis Decreto Defensio, Amyraut took occasion to reassert covertly his main positions . . . Continue reading →
There is a phrase in journalism called “burying the lead” (or, since about 1979, the cloying variant lede). The lead (lede) is the paragraph in which the most important, salient facts are contained. In the old days (c. 1975), the writer was . . . Continue reading →
In Calvin, these two perspectives are still connected with each other, but in Reformed theology they soon split apart, and both developed in a one-sided direction. Under the influence of Socinianism and Remonstrantism, Cartesianism and Amyraldism, there sprang up the neonomian view . . . Continue reading →
The interest of the debate to us lies in the revelation which it gives us of the presence in the Assembly of an influential and able, but apparently small, body of men whose convictions lay in the direction of the modified Calvinism . . . Continue reading →
According to the common doctrine of Augustinians, as expressed in the Westminster Catechism, “God, having … elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring . . . Continue reading →