Theology for Everyone

A colorful coat given to a boy. An evening walk on a palace roof. A red cord hung from a prostitute’s window. These brief scenes from over three thousand years ago should have no bearing on our lives today. Yet these moments were used to bring about the most important event in human history: the...

Legend has it that the great Reformer Martin Luther once threw an ink well at the Devil who had been incessantly accusing him. [1] Whether or not this is true, Luther certainly had remarkable fits and fights with the ancient foe who seeks to work us woe. And often, this involved stinkering at Satan...

Recently, a Reformed brother told me that he was nearly driven by depression to suicide due to years of wrongful, incessant attacks upon him and his wife by other family members teaming up with the government. He confessed if he was an Arminian he likely would have succumbed, but his belief in God’...

Review of Eric Metaxas: “Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World” In his biography of Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World , Eric Metaxas paints a stunningly beautiful portrait of this late-medieval monk. For those who have heard some of the...

In 1529, artist Lucas Cranach the Elder produced a panel painting that visualized the theology of his famous friend, Martin Luther. The two wings of the painting represent the path to salvation through the law and the gospel. The left panel depicts a naked man being prodded to hell by a devil and a...

Martin Luther is best remembered today as the Reformer who defended the doctrine of justification by faith alone against the constant assaults of the Roman Catholic Papacy. However, this was but one conflict that Luther was engaged in during his lifetime. Another significant conflict of Luther’s...

Think of a cup being filled to the brim—or inflating a children’s play castle or a basketball to its entire design. The thing being pervaded is what it is, but it is in the process of functioning fully and living up to its potential and peak performance until completely full. Such gets at the sense...

Irresistible grace is the fourth part of the Tulip acronym and is the one doctrine of grace that every Christian, deep down, can never deny. No Christian will balk in a Sunday morning worship service when the congregation sings Amazing Grace (written by John Newton, a Calvinist pastor of the...

A theological earthquake shook my life over twenty years ago. I can still see the classroom lit by the afternoon sun. It was mostly quiet and peaceful that day with one exception. A classmate was standing in front of me trying for all he was worth to persuade me of definite or limited atonement. If...

Let us not take away half the love of God by saying he only started to love us at our baptism or only after we came to faith. Let us not take away half the love of God by saying he only loved us in a trickling, generally vague way until we ourselves harnessed and focused his love like a laser...