The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it. So wrote Martin Luther, in the last one of the 28 theses that he composed for the disputation on April 26, 1518. Those theses and their […]
Category: Soteriology
Jesse Johnson briefly describes the context which required that Protestant beliefs be defined, and he summarizes the 5 points which all orthodox Protestants agree are essentials of Christian faith and life. We should note, however, that although these five basic truths were frequently affirmed by leaders of the Reformation, they did not constitute a formal […]
In my biblical and theological study of the possibility of the salvation of the unevangelized, I have presented a position that I call “accessibilism” (see Who Can Be Saved?). Among the varied understandings of how God makes salvation accessible to everyone, is a position I call “universal revelation accessibilism.” This asserts that God saves some […]
When we pray the Lord’s prayer, we find it easy at the start. We do want our heavenly Father’s name to be reverenced, and we do want his kingdom to come, which means that his “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are also happy to ask God for our daily […]
Last Friday, at the Festival of Faith and Writing held at Calvin College, Cornelius Plantinga Jr. preached an excellent sermon during the Vespers service, which was itself beautifully designed. He described quite elaborately the way our bodies work when attacked by a virus, countering it with antibodies and, after defeating it, building antibodies to guard […]
N. T. Wright devoted a large proportion of his massive tome, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, to the relationship between the church and Israel, and he argues for a total replacement, what is often dubbed “supersessionism.” Larry Hurtado posits that Wright is correct on a couple of very important points: Repeatedly, Wright takes the […]
Thus far, I have responded to 3 criticisms leveled against hypothetical knowledge Calvinism in John Laing’s ETS paper in 2013: that it is vulnerable to the grounding objection that Calvinists and Open Theists bring against Molinism that it has an “odd notion of necessity/possibility,” and that it includes an “odd ontology of personhood.” In this […]
A few of the major Arminian bloggers whose posts I follow have spoken very favorably of Austin Fischer’s book, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed. The book sounds very interesting but I don’t know when (or if) I’ll get to read it. So I was delighted to read an […]
In Tough Questions Christians Ask, published by Christianity Today in 1989 and then reprinted as a web only article in 2003, Peter Kreeft answers 35 questions about eternity, mostly with regard to heaven. (The few questions about hell are answered interestingly, but it is difficult to tell from those answers alone whether or not Kreeft affirms […]
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Chastity as an evangelistic method
I’m always fascinated by the way in which God brings people to himself, and I just read one conversion story that wonderfully illustrates the variety of means God uses. Guillaume Bignon is a French atheist who met an American Christian woman on vacation in St. Martin. He liked her but her faith dictated that they […]