There is a popular notion that the church originated from a decision by a handful of followers of Jesus of Nazareth to start a movement. In the same way as other world religions started and grew through human determination and…
I went to listen, to get a lay of the land. What I heard was, humanly speaking, both frightening and exasperating. Perhaps you have heard of my community in the news, which is just north of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania. …
In the late 1890’s B. B. Warfield, along with several other men, wrote against “the impatience . . . with the effort to define truth and to state with precision the doctrinal presuppositions and contents of Christianity.”[1] Such impatience was…
Ministering in a small, rural town with over ten churches, all with relatively low attendance, I have often heard the question, “What makes your church different?” I have found this question difficult to answer, not because I couldn’t rattle off…
Just as bottles of distilled water offer drink that is free of poisonous chemicals and clogging minerals, so the Church’s confessions provide boiled-down, condensed, purified orthodoxy for healthy Body life systems. For instance, a seminary student being examined on the…
Many doctrinally solid evangelical churches would not self-identify as “confessional”. What is the value of historic confessions for this kind of typical evangelical church? If the church is already doctrinally orthodox, evangelical, and solid, why encourage such people to think…
Blessed with the gift of saving faith, the believer is now able to hear what he could not hear before, to believe sincerely what he rejected outrightly. The sheep hear the voice of the One they now know as “my…
In today’s church, there are a number of significant questions about the doctrine of assurance. Some argue that you cannot ever really know if you’re saved at all; others insist that if you made some kind of profession of faith,…
There are those who claim that the Westminster Confession of Faith is a scholastic document lacking in pastoral sensitivity but abounding in the dust of theological tomes. But is it? I don’t think so. In fact, I am convinced that…
Pastor Henry Cumings (1739-1823) was a Congregationalist pastor in Billerica, Massachusetts for his entire ministry. After graduating from Harvard in 1760, he later was honored with a doctorate by Harvard in 1800. He was an outspoken revolutionary leader who preached…
