The Covid crisis has been one of the greater challenges faced by the church in the West in recent years. In the USA and elsewhere it has divided congregations and probed weaknesses in our theology, piety, and practice. It has raised questions . . . Continue reading →
John Calvin (1509-64) was one of the most significant figures in the history of the West. He was among the major Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century. He contributed significantly to the Reformed wing of the Reformation. He was an industrious Bible . . . Continue reading →
The word ecumenical means universal and the ecumenical creeds are the church’s articulation of the universal (or, in that same sense) catholic faith taught in Holy Scripture and confessed by the church since the time of the apostles. The apostolic church itself . . . Continue reading →
The doctrine of Christian liberty was one of the principal achievements of the Protestant Reformation. The medieval church had come to think that there are two streams of authority, Scripture and an alleged unwritten apostolic tradition curated by the church. Over time . . . Continue reading →
I was surprised to learn that of the more than 6,000 Heidelblog posts, two of the most popular have been Grammar Guerrilla posts: Grammar Guerrilla: Comfort v Comfortability and Grammar Guerrilla: Agreement v Agreeance. Continue reading →
The early Christian theologians implicitly distinguished within the 613 Mosaic Commandments (as the rabbis numbered them) between the judicial, ceremonial, and moral law. The moral law refers to the natural law, the law issued in creation and symbolized by the commandment not . . . Continue reading →
Apart from getting the gospel right and getting the gospel out, there is perhaps no problem more pressing upon the church than that of how to relate Christ to culture. H. Richard Niebuhr identified three approaches: Christ against culture (e.g., Tertullian), Christ . . . Continue reading →
Biblicism is not the attempt to be faithful to Scripture (i.e., to be biblical). Rather, in its extreme form, biblicism is the attempt to read Scripture in isolation. It is the attempt to read Scripture in isolation from the rest of Scripture . . . Continue reading →
The sixth commandment of God’s holy moral law says, “You shall not murder.” Christians have always understood this to prohibit abortion, i.e., the unjust taking of a human life in utero. The Didache (c. AD 114), an early Christian document testifying to . . . Continue reading →
The first war fought in the name of the new American Republic was the “War for Independence” (1775–83). In the Declaration of Independence (1776), the American founders declared, in the preamble, “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men . . . Continue reading →
Political correctness (PC) is a movement whose roots are in Marxist-Leninism and the Communist Revolution in Russia of 1917. According to this dogma, speech is said to be “politically correct” when it conforms to the dictates of the party. In its original . . . Continue reading →
According to J. H. Alsted (1588–1638), “the article justification is said to be the article of the standing or falling of the church.” It was said to be such by the confessionally Reformed and Lutheran alike. The language was probably borrowed from . . . Continue reading →
These are contentious issues but the popular discussion of them, including some ecclesiastical publications, is not always well-informed by the history of Christian thought. These two resource pages are composed partly out of the HB archives and partly of bibliography. Both sets . . . Continue reading →
From time to time, evangelicals and a few from the confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches to convert to Romanism. They do so for a variety of reasons but one commonality among them is ignorance of the history of the Western church, the . . . Continue reading →
Those nineteenth-century Germans thought that the Reformed had deduced their whole theology, piety, and practice from their doctrine of predestination were wrong but the doctrine of God is at the headwaters of the Christian religion. Everything we say about everything else, method, . . . Continue reading →
The Reformed theologians and churches have held, taught, and confessed the existence of natural law since the earliest days of the Reformed Reformation in the 1520s. If all one knows, however, of Reformed theology is 20th century (or 21st-century) Reformed theology, one . . . Continue reading →
The Belgic Confession is one of the jewels of the Reformed Reformation. Largely derived from the French Confession (1559), the Belgic, nevertheless, has an identity of its own. Based on a series of sermons and drafted by Guy de Brès (1522–67), who . . . Continue reading →
The Reformation was, at its core, the recovery of the biblical doctrine that Scripture is the only final authority (sola Scriptura) for the Christian faith and the Christian life, that salvation is by divine favor alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola . . . Continue reading →
Few Christians doctrines have been as controverted, in the modern period, as the atonement. For whom did Christ die? What did he accomplish in his death? Should we say that Christ died for all? These are just some of the questions addressed . . . Continue reading →
In our never-ending quest to make the resources of the Heidelblog easily accessible we have created a new resource page devoted to LGBTQ issues, Revoice and so-called “Side-B” (Gay) Christianity. Here is the resource: Resources On LGBTQ And Revoice. The HB Resource Page contains . . . Continue reading →