In this episode Dr Clark and Brad Isbell consider the question: Can NAPARC Be Normal and offer two books as antidotes to unnecessary weirdness: Remembering the Reformed Confession (just published by the Heidelberg Reformation Association) and Recovering the Reformed Confession, published in 2008. Continue reading →
At the end of March Brad Isbell, Wilson Van Hooser and I discussed whether Revivalism can be Reformed. As usual, great fun was had by all. Here’s the video: Here’s the audio-only episode in the Presbycast Libsyn feed. Subscribe to the Presbycast . . . Continue reading →
In the last month, we have witnessed the death of one pope and the election of another, and as typically happened, we saw reporters speaking in solemn tones about the unbroken line of succession from Peter to Leo XIV. Also, recent months . . . Continue reading →
It is no longer revolutionary (no pun intended) to hold that the earth revolves around the sun, but it was not always so. The observation of Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), that the universe is heliocentric (sun-centered) and not geocentric (earth-centered) was met with . . . 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 →
As I write there is a major land war ongoing between Russia and Ukraine, Israel has suffered a horrific terrorist attack by Hamas and is facing a two-front war with Hamas to the South and Hezbollah to the North as she seeks . . . Continue reading →
John Muether explains the attraction of theonomy. Continue reading →
Nothing has been more characteristic of current post-millennialism than its emphasis on the kingship of the ascended Christ; nothing fires the Postmil vision more than that reality. Yet it is just this reality that post-millennialism affectively compromises and, in part, even denies. . . . Continue reading →
We are living in a time when the consciousness of the end of the world not only grips the community of faith, but also the world at large. Political and economic chaos characterize our news reports, and the recent applications made in . . . Continue reading →
Recently a regular reader of this space and a valued correspondent wrote to ask about these movements and how we should think about them and especially about those who argue that the Westminster Confession requires orthodox Reformed Christians to reject the practice of textual criticism in favor of those texts that were extant at the time of the Westminster Assembly. Continue reading →
Another Christian musician has announced that he has “deconstructed” his faith. Continue reading
Within the last two weeks or so it has been asserted by some, in a letter to a congregation, that the doctrine of cultural transformation is a matter of Reformed orthodoxy and that anyone who dissents from what this letter describes as the “Kuyperian” tradition, which is a little over a century old, is “outside” of Reformed orthodoxy. Continue reading
I am in the studio today to work on an Office Hours podcast for May so there is just time for a quick thought about another way the Reformed confessions can help the churches be more faithful. Continue reading
It is difficult to imagine. Jonathan Edwards countenancing the “Confus’d, but very Affecting Noise” that erupted in Suffield, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1741. Yet there he stood, his loud voice rising in prayer above the din that emanated from an assembly of . . . Continue reading →
Presbyterian and Reformed congregations occupy an odd space in American Christianity. We do not really belong to American Christianity in significant ways. Our roots are not in the nineteenth-century revivals nor even in the eighteenth-century revivals. We are no part of the . . . Continue reading →
A correspondent to the Heidelblog writes: …I have been living in the Heidelblog lately, and have been challenged to rethink so many previous convictions. Thank you for this resource! I especially have been edified by the QIRC/QIRE idea, but thinking through it . . . Continue reading →
Preface As a young Christian, as I was beginning to study Greek and to learn the Reformed theology, piety, and practice, I could see the textual apparatus in the footnotes of my copy of the Greek New Testament but I could not . . . Continue reading →
For a few years now Ligonier, in conjunction with Lifeway, has been conducting surveys of Americans (and others) to track the state of American Christianity. They want to know, as they write, what “Americans believe about God, salvation, ethics, and the Bible.” . . . Continue reading →
Jason Estopinal is the host of the podcast and he writes: “It’s been said that for fish that living under water, with all they’ve ever known is underwater living, and all the other fish around them also only know underwater living—that these . . . Continue reading →
The phrase “swimming the Tiber” is a metaphor for converting from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. I have not been able to determine its origins but the online Dictionary of Christianese traces the expression to 1963, which, if true, would mean that it . . . Continue reading →
