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Theological method

“Conservative” and “progressive”: Are these our best terms to describe the alternatives?

Recently, I was listening to an Eerdmans interview with Megan DeFranza in which she spoke of the different Christian perspectives on the issue of “transgender.” She distinguished between them as a “conservative” perspective and a “progressive” perspective. Those are common labels in matters like this, and I have probably used them myself, but I have […]

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Ecclesiology Evangelicalism Roman Catholicism

Will Pope Francis’s tenure see the end of the Reformation?

Division in the church is a great scandal and a hindrance to our witness (Jn 17:20-23), but can the breaches possibly be healed, even between the truly believing portions of the church in its major branches? Pope Francis hopes so and plans to move it along. This is something that will bear watching, as we […]

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Christianity Spirituality

How evangelical Christianity has changed during my lifetime

I have spent all my life in a very similar context to the kind of evangelical environment that Roger Olson describes as his experience. My parents were evangelical missionaries; I attended a missionary boarding school for all but one of my years of elementary and high school education; I attended an evangelical Bible College, graduate […]

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Education Spirituality

On the value and risk of learning

Learning, like riches, may add to usefulness, when sanctified. But, like riches, it exposes to snares and temptations; it is hard to have it without trusting in it. (John Newton) In recent decades there have been numerous expressions of concern about anti-intellectualism among evangelicals these days. Mark Noll’s 1995 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical […]

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Books Ecclesiology Spirituality

On being Evangelical, Reformed and Baptist

Michael Horton’s presentation Michael Horton begins chapter 6 of For Calvinism,  by explaining why the Calvinist view of the Christian life is neither an antinomian nor a legalist perspective, despite its often being charged with both of these errors. “New covenant saints are still obligated to obey the moral law” (124), and we do not […]