In Tolkien’s Two Towers Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas attack a white-clad old man, thinking him Saruman. Realizing their error, they apologize to Gandalf saying, “We thought you were Saruman.” Gandalf says, “I am Saruman, or rather Saruman as he should have been.” . . . Continue reading →
Reviews
Review: Preaching As Reminding: Stirring Memory In An Age Of Forgetfulness By Jeffrey D. Arthurs
I wonder how many books about preaching have been published. Two hundred? Five hundred? It is hard to know for sure, but the number is not small. And although there are numerous books about preaching, most of them are quite similar. They . . . Continue reading →
Review: Plans for Holy War: How the Spiritual Soldier Fights, Conquers, and Triumphs By John Arrowsmith
The Reformed and Presbyterian world is currently enjoying a steady stream of recently-translated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises and writings heretofore only available in Latin—texts written by luminaries like Theodore Beza, Caspar Olevianus, William Ames, Robert Rollock, Francis Turretin, and Johann Heidegger, to . . . Continue reading →
Review: Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, And The Spiritual Mission Of The Church By Alan D. Strange (Part 2)
We pick up again with Alan Strange’s treatment of Hodge in Empowered Witness. There are some questions raised by this work that bear consideration in a review. A reader who is not already in sympathy with the essential argument or who perhaps . . . Continue reading →
Review: Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, And the Spiritual Mission Of The Church By Alan D. Strange (Part 1)
The debate last year over the overture by Evangel Presbytery to the General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church in America (overture 12), which was adopted by GA, presented acutely the question of the spirituality of the church. Overture 12 asked GA . . . Continue reading →
Review: To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory From Marx To Marcuse By Carl R. Trueman
Approaching the one-thousand-year-old Oxford Castle and Prison from the east, at the corner of Castle St. and New Rd., the entire crosswalk is emblazoned with rainbow colors, indicating the Oxford city council’s solidarity with the local LGBTQ+ community. Continue reading →
Review: Towards A Reformed Apologetics: A Critique Of The Thought Of Cornelius Van Til By Keith A. Mathison
If you have been in the Presbyterian and Reformed world long, at some point you have likely heard of Cornelius Van Til. He has had an enormous influence. For some people, Reformed and presuppositional apologetics are nearly synonyms. This may be surprising . . . Continue reading →
Review: Who Chose the Books of the New Testament? By Charles E. Hill
We have twenty-seven New Testament books in our Christian Bibles. More properly, we have twenty-seven historical records, accounts, and letters about Jesus the Christ and his church at work through the Holy Spirit in the first-century world. These, together with the Hebrew . . . Continue reading →
Review: Reading Genesis By Marilynne Robinson
Within the bookstore of biblical studies, an alarming variety of works rest upon the shelves. Erudite tomes of philology and archeology, collections of sermons, thematic monographs, devotional series, and popular commentaries intermingle like diverse species in a rainforest. Arguably, each type has . . . Continue reading →
Review: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda By Megan Basham (Part 2)
In the responses to Part 1 of this review, many comments pointed out that I had not engaged much with the negative aspects of Shepherds for Sale. In this second part, I will include reflections on the less precise and more unhelpful . . . Continue reading →
Review: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda By Megan Basham (Part 1)
The controversy surrounding Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale has somewhat died down by now, but the fault lines it has clarified in the Christian media world are still clear. There are those whose suspicions about progressive influences in Christian institutions have been . . . Continue reading →
Review: My Only Comfort: The Heidelberg Catechism For Devotional Reading By Amanda Martin
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) is naturally suited for devotional use. Its devotional qualities have been recognized almost from the instant it was first published. How many people who know virtually nothing else about the catechism know all or part of the first . . . Continue reading →
Review: What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church By Gavin Ortlund
Not many dates are worthy of remembrance over a century-and-a-half later. The beginning or end of a war or the death of a nation’s leader might be on people’s radar for a few decades, maybe a century, but eventually the slow decay . . . Continue reading →
Review: All Things are Ready: Understanding the Gospel in its Fullness and Freeness By Donald John MacLean
Not many things make a preacher more excited than having visitors to the congregation any given morning or evening for worship. We encourage our people to invite their friends, family members, co-workers, and neighbors, and hopefully we ourselves are doing the same . . . Continue reading →
Review: The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark By Douglas J. Douma
In 1946, the General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) was going through one of the most controversial events in its history. Formed a decade earlier in 1936, the church was still young, and its founder, the Princeton professor of New . . . Continue reading →
A Failed Project
Following up on his 2021 work The Failure of Natural Theology, which served as a clarion call to abandon the retrieval movement and return to a more biblical view of natural theology and Christian theism, Jeffrey Johnson has published another work towards this . . . Continue reading →
Review: Covenant Foundations: Understanding the Promise-Keeping God of the Bible By Alec Motyer
I am not a betting man, but if I were I would be willing to bet some serious book money that if you start talking theological shop with any Presbyterian or Reformed Christian, you will hear the word covenant within the first . . . Continue reading →
Review: Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment By William Inboden
In early July 2024, at the fourth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C., Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Doug Wilson, Pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, ID, met to discuss Christian nationalism in America.1 During a panel, . . . Continue reading →
Review: Children At The Lord’s Table? By Cornelis P. Venema (Part Three)
According to Venema, the “most important and compelling piece of New Testament evidence that bears on the question of paedocommunion is undeniably 1 Corinthians 11:17–34” (101). This is because this passage is “the most extensive and comprehensive New Testament passage on the . . . Continue reading →
Review: Children At The Lord’s Table? By Cornelis P. Venema (Part Two)
Venema observes that the Reformed churches are committed to the principle of sola Scriptura which means that the Scriptures are to be “regarded as the supreme standard for their faith and life,” but that principle does not mean that we read the Scriptures in isolation from the church or from church history (27). Continue reading →