But it’s not until the turn of the 20th century, as evangelicals make a concerted effort to apply their specifically American faith to the reform of a secular country, that things heat up. If you remember the Scopes monkey trial from high school and are tempted to skim FitzGerald’s bit on that 1920s dispute, don’t.... Continue Reading

So, the traditional view of penal substitution is constantly portrayed as an angry Father venting his anger on his innocent Son. He damns the traditional doctrine of penal substitution by constantly referring to it as pagan and capricious: ‘paganising “angry God punishing Jesus”’ [234]; ‘divine petulance’ [224]; ‘Capricious, or malevolent divinity longing to kill someone,... Continue Reading

There is far too much packed into this book for me to mention everything. If you’re a Clarkian, you need to give this a read. If you’re a Vantillian, this book is definitely worth the read and I think it will breed more sympathy for Clark personally as well as appreciation for his thought. If... Continue Reading

I am here assuming as proven that church involvement is necessary if one believes and obeys Jesus. My target in this post is establishing the more fundamental truth that believing Jesus is fundamental to being a Christian, and that Biblically-understood faith issues in obedience. Of course, obeying Jesus will necessarily mean that we will be personally involved... Continue Reading

“Calvin’s friends had good reason for proceeding to publish [a biography] with haste. There were others who wanted to tell a very different story. Calvin’s nemesis Jerome Bolsec lived to have the last word, and penned two accounts ten years after the reformer’s death.”   The title is all the introduction you need. Here we... Continue Reading

But for African American Baptists and Methodists between the wars, there was a single theological objection to dispensationalism—it was, in their opinion, a newfangled and contrived way of reading the Bible. In this respect, they were more traditional than the white fundamentalists who claimed to only read their Bibles in traditional ways. For them, a... Continue Reading

“Thus the saints in the Scriptures prayed, as Elijah, Elisha, David and others, with short, but strong and powerful words; as we see in the Psalms, in which there is hardly one that has a prayer of more than five or six verses. Therefore the old fathers have very properly said, there is no use... Continue Reading

There is a story behind every book. The story for this book was painfully sweet and stitched to my soul. A couple of years ago I was enduring a particularly difficult season. It seemed as though God had allowed affliction to hover like a rain cloud over my life. Pastoral ministry was especially trying even... Continue Reading

“In offering the Benedict Option, Dreher almost completely overlooks the wisdom of Christians, especially people of color, who have always endured marginalization. The absence of the influence or perspective of people of African descent is particularly noticeable. The Benedict Option takes a running leap over the black church and lands on another continent in another... Continue Reading

“Ben Franklin would famously grow skeptical about his father’s faith, but in many ways that faith—and its emphasis on the need for public morality and charity—would continue to mark Franklin’s own endeavors as an adult.”   One of the main arguments of my forthcoming biography of Benjamin Franklin is that Christian relatives and friends left... Continue Reading