This has been a strange week in Lake Wobegon. No sooner had the news emerged that an evangelical megachurch, James River Church (Springfield, MO) hired a male stripper/sword swallower—who, according to Julie Roys, “moonlights as a pole-dancing striptease artist at gay nightclubs”—to . . . Continue reading →
Dr Clark answers questions about mental images of Christ and the sacred/secular distinction. Continue reading →
After his re-election as governor of the State of Oklahoma, the hon. Kevin Stitt appeared at a prayer rally. He said the following: STITT: “Father, we just claim Oklahoma for you. Every square inch, we claim it for you in the name . . . Continue reading →
To follow up on the earlier essay on Christ and culture, I want to make a further observation about the importance of creation or nature as a category of thought. When many conservative Christians think of creation, the first thing they think . . . Continue reading →
There may be no more pressing issue before Christians (as individuals) and the visible church (as a corporate body) than the question of Christ and culture. Much of what concerns us all just now goes back, in one way or another, to . . . Continue reading →
A significant part of the process of recovering and applying classical Reformed theology to our contemporary situation (sometimes called ressourcement, a French word which refers to getting back to original sources) is recovering the distinctions that we lost in the 19th and . . . Continue reading →
One of the more pernicious misrepresentations of the distinction between the eternal and temporal spheres of Christ’s kingdom, which Calvin called the “twofold kingdom” (Institutes, 3.19.15), is that it counsels or leads Christians to withdraw from society (e.g., politics). Nothing could be . . . Continue reading →
s noted here previously, the mainline (liberal) PCUSA has adopted more than 120 positions on a bewildering variety of issues. The temptation to use the visible church to achieve one’s desired social goals is almost irresistible. Continue reading →
As much as the debates in Commonweal and the Times revealed that Roman Catholics were not of the same mind about the church’s relationship to modern society, those disputes were mild compared to a revival of antiliberalism from Roman Catholic intellectuals. In . . . Continue reading →
Integralism and Protestant theocracy are twin movements of which our readers should be aware. The first is a Romanist movement. The second is a movement among a small but visible band Protestants who seek a similar outcome. Roman Integralism Romanist “integralists” like . . . Continue reading →
The question of how Christians should relate Christ (i.e., their allegiance to Christ and the Christian faith) to culture is perhaps the most pressing challenge facing the Christians individually and the institutional, visible church. A subset of this question touches on how . . . Continue reading →
A few years ago President Trump nominated Russell Vought to a post in his administration. Opponents of the nominee found an article written by Vought in which he criticized a Wheaton College professor for advocating a pluralist approach to salvation. During his confirmation hearing the ACLU bizarrely attacked Vought for denying religious liberty. The ACLU conflated Vought’s religious views with his policy views (perhaps because that is what the ACLU now does). Sen. Sanders of Vermont grilled Vought over his public, Christian conviction that faith in Jesus is the only way of salvation. Either Sanders was being cynical or he is incredibly ill-informed about a basic tenet of orthodox Christianity. Continue reading →
John Calvin (1509–64) famously wrote that the human heart is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Institutes 1.11.18).
There are three major questions here: Halloween, the Sabbath, and how Christians ought to relate their faith in Christ to their life in the broader culture. Continue reading →
In this series we have been considering Christian eschatology, i.e., what should we think about the last days, about the relations between heaven and earth, and how that informs how we think about and live the Christian life between the ascension and . . . 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 →
