My youngest daughter Peace was participating in a missionary trip to Mexico years ago with a local evangelical church. This was a basically good group, as far as I can tell, though I would, of course, disagree with some of their theological distinctives.She asked me, "Dad, before we go, we're required to give the group [...]
Month: June 2012
Is Obedience a Christian Duty?
Mark Galli, Managing Editor of Christianity Today, writes:We are in the bad habit of thinking that ethics is a REAL SERIOUS BUSINESS [his caps], that our welfare and the welfare of the world depend on its proper execution. Not quite. The gospel is the end of ethics in this sense. In Christ, God was reconciling the world [...]
What Is the Gospel?
So here is the problem. Man is a guilty sinner, God is a holy God. How can the two be brought together? The answer is the cross of Christ. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Cross[1] “God was in Christ,” writes Paul to the church at Corinth, “reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing [counting] their trespasses [...]
Romancing Utopia
I detest the notion of a new dawn in which Homo sapiens would live in harmony. The hope this utopia engenders justified the bloodiest exterminations in history. François Bizot[1] In his brief but weighty tract Communism: A History,[2] Harvard historian Richard Pipes observes what others before him[3] have noted — the driving force behind [...]
The Deity of Jesus Christ as Jewish Monotheism
My Christology will never be the same. In his God Crucified: Monotheism & Christology in the New Testament, Richard Bauckham argues that: The deity of Jesus as an aspect of orthodox Christology did not develop in the patristic church but was already a tenet of the first (Jewish) church that had sufficient categories to identify [...]
It’s the Ecclesiology, Stupid
On Being Honestly Wrong Jason Stellman was correct to relinquish his Protestant ministerial credentials when he became no longer convinced of the distinctive Protestant dicta of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and sola fide (faith alone). Jason was confessionally bound (Westminster Confession of Faith) to both distinctives in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), and the [...]
