Meet the Puritans

S piritual disciplines have now been a regular feature in Evangelical teaching on discipleship for several decades. This has been a good development, to the degree that it has led believers into renewed habits of bible reading, meditation, and prayer. Many of these books, however, freely utilize...

I have never taken part in an Evangelism Explosion course but I do know and have at times used one of their well-known diagnostic questions: “If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My heaven?’ what would you say?” This question is designed to discover if the person understands the...

T he narrative of the Thirty-nine articles has set the primacy of the Scriptures as the principal means by which God is revealed and has set the details of the application of this same principle. Scripture alone determines the limits of the church’s authority in the formulation of doctrine and set...

L ast time, we considered the Puritan doctrine of Scripture. According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Scriptures primarily teach us “what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.” The Bible as “a full and perfect canon” provides “the Credenda, what we are to...

Every Wednesday in 2018, Michael Lynch (PhD candidate at Calvin Theological Seminary) and our own editor Danny Hyde (PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will be blogging through Richard Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics , 4 vols. (2nd edition, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,...

Richard A. Muller, Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017). 329pp. Hardcover. $45.00. R ichard Muller has gained a (deserved) reputation as one of the leading scholars of historic Reformed orthodox...

Christ’s Presence in the Lord’s Supper “O ne reason why we so little value the ordinance [of the Lord’s Supper], and profit so little by it, may be because we understand so little of the nature of that special communion with Christ which we have therein,” wrote John Owen. [1] It's the nature of...

S logans are memorable, simple summaries of truths that are often quite complex. By design, therefore, they are not meant to convey every nuance of a particular topic. Unfortunately, this makes them liable to misunderstanding and misuse. A case in point is the saying that I want to look at in this...

W e have seen how the Reformation’s rediscovery of sola scriptura reset both the authority of the Church and General Councils (Article 20 and 21) and how necessary it is that the visible church must remain within the bounds of the invisible or serious doctrinal error is the inevitable result (...

S o , this is part 5 of a series I am just announcing now, which I hope is not too much of a distraction. We have looked at Puritan theology and theologizing in general in the first three posts. Then in the last, we gazed upon the natural and divine lights, as Stephen Charnock called them, denoting...