Most of us have heard the morality tale of the frog that leapt from the boiling pot when tossed in but allowed himself to be placed in a pot of cool water over a stove and boiled slowly to death.  Myth or not, it describes the pernicious deceptiveness of apostasy.  The unwary, foolish young man Continue reading

It’s remarkable that conservatives don’t understand how Genesis (creation) and John 3:16 (redemption) hang and fall together, because liberals understand it all too well.  In one of the most quoted liberal works of the first part of the 20th century, Harvard Professor of Church History Kirsopp Lake writes:  [T]he Fundamentalists are perfectly right in thinking Continue reading

It is perhaps surprising that an essay published by group with such a fully deserved reputation for vilifying other Christians as the Trinity Foundation should be so theologically on target, not to mention uncharacteristically judicious and charitable as Timothy F. Kauffman’s “Sanctification, Half Full: The Myopic Hermeneutic of the ‘Grace Movement.’” Can a leopard change his Continue reading

In contemplating Christian theology, it’s vital to distinguish synchronic from diachronic theology. The Bible is not chiefly about theology (as in “systematic theology”), but about God’s revelation in history, centered in the Person of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.   However, the Bible does set forth theology (John’s account of Jesus’ teachings, Paul’s interpretation of Continue reading

Not all false teachings in the church are properly classed as theological heresies, such that they would violate a specific doctrinal statement or confession of faith.  Some of the most pernicious false teachings, ordinarily more implied than explicated, can pass muster at the bar of almost any traditional confession of faith — and in fact Continue reading

In his otherwise helpful essay defending the traditionally Reformed view of justification, Michael Horton writes, “The gospel of free justification gives rise to a spontaneous embrace of the very law that once condemned it” (105).  Horton is explicitly countering the argument that if one situates justification at the center of Pauline soteriology, he is hard Continue reading