But some popular writers simply become biography factories, churning out a new one on some well-known figure every year (or more), just in time for Christmas, often repackaging old myths and inaccuracies.

Are Jerry Bridges and J. I. Packer—two men who have written extensively about the pursuit of holiness—especially judgmental and arrogant? The men and women at my church who strive each day to wage war against the flesh and grow in grace do not fit Galli’s description. And the Puritans? Galli’s comment is either overstated or unfair

How often do unjust institutions get struck down, particularly if those institutions have existed for all of human history and could be found in every region of the world? I am a historian, so I will give you an authoritative answer: not often.

All of us are haunted by the work under the work—that need to prove and save ourselves, to gain a sense of worth and identity. But if we can experience gospel-rest in our hearts, if we can be free from the need to earn our salvation through our work, we will have a deep reservoir... Continue Reading

Every Christian and every church already has a creed in the sense that they all “think the Bible means something and that its teaching can be summarized” in different words. “The only difference is whether one writes the confession down, so that others may scrutinize it and judge whether its teaching is consistent with Scripture,... Continue Reading

VanDoodewaard’s tone is gracious, but she is not tentative in pointing out the sins that often accompany homesickness: grumbling, laziness, bitterness, discontent. And, in a refreshingly counter-cultural perspective, she admonishes readers to “exert yourself in controlling your emotions” (p. 45,) freely acknowledging that how we feel is our responsibility.

If Stephens and Giberson’s book is supposed to encourage us evangelicals to become more intellectual and engage the ideas of our secular culture, I suspect that in most cases it will backfire.  For many evangelicals the book will serve as an object lesson in the dangers of compromising with “secular knowledge.”  It might make them... Continue Reading

When Calvin comes to his well-known doctrine of predestination, it is important to see where he places it. He does not deal with the doctrine under Book 1 where he treats God, or even Book 2 where he addresses sin and Christ. He waits until Book 3, which is about "How We Receive the Grace of Christ" through the Holy Spirit. Calvin insists that the opposite of the doctrine of predestination is not the idea of free will but the teaching that we are saved by our good works.

At one point in my ministry here I regularly visited my members at their workplace---either eating lunch with them in their office or just going by to see them there. Usually these visits had to be brief---20 to 30 minutes. But this made it possible to learn quite a lot about their work-issues and the environment in which they spent so much of their time.

Inerrancy and the Gospels is a treasure trove of theological wisdom. Readers will find that Poythress sprinkles theological and exegetical insights onto almost every page, which makes reading this book a joyful task. For example, Poythress offers apt advice on the synoptic problem when he states that “the meaning of a discourse . . . consists in what it says, not in the history of its origin". Therefore “we do not have to solve the synoptic problem” to read the Gospels well.