“Then presently comes someone who preaches to me: ‘If you want to be pious and serve God, then put on a hood, pray daily so many rosaries, burn so many little candles to St. Anna.’  Then I fall in with this like a blind man and everybody’s fool and prisoner, and do everything I am... Continue Reading

“She begins the story, appropriately, with the 18th-century revivals of the First Great Awakening, the birthplace of American evangelicalism. She demonstrates that from the beginning the movement was primarily religious and theological, with political overtones, and quite diverse.”   I first encountered Frances FitzGerald in the 1970s when I read her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Vietnam... Continue Reading

“God the Father offers forgiveness as a free gift of his grace.  When you go to him, weighed down with the debt of all your guilt and sin, he will not sit down with you to work out a payment plan.  He will not scheme to charge you more interest.  He will not send you... Continue Reading

Reset is a helpful book that offers wisdom that will help men avoid patterns that lead to burnout. For those who have already experienced it, it will help them avoid repeating the errors that led them there. It does not promise a life of ease, but it does promise a life that is sustainable, a... Continue Reading

The prefix “homo,” which means “same,” evokes a world without ultimate distinctions, where everything is ontologically the same, where all things share the same substance. Pushed to its religious consequences, a world without distinctions is the world of paganism: everything in creation shares the same divine spark or energy and is worshiped as divine. The... Continue Reading

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