When I first started reading about Eternal Subordination of the Son and the parallels being drawn between Father/Son and husband/wife, I wondered what those who teach ESS did with the Holy Spirit. It seemed to me that He was left out of the analogy. I jokingly wondered if the husband is the Father and wife... Continue Reading

But the Bible conceives of these things very differently. In Proverbs, friendship is far more than a verb for sharing your contact details on Facebook. A friend is someone who knows your soul. Someone who doesn’t just know lots about you, but knows you. And, Proverbs shows us, we cannot hope to live wisely in... Continue Reading

Ware says that he embraces EG as “the only explanation that grounds the Father as the eternal Father, and the Son as the eternal Son.” Though he remains concerned about biblical support, he is happy to affirm the church’s doctrine of the eternal modes of subsistence: the Father is the Father because he begets the... Continue Reading

It turns out that Anglo-American Puritans and evangelicals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used the phrase “receive Christ into your heart,” or something like it, with some regularity. The great Puritan devotional writer John Flavel, for example, spoke of those who had heard the gospel but who would “receive not Christ into their hearts.”... Continue Reading

  The claim that Mr. Said is a nice man, and therefore would never seek the conversion of non-Muslims, is a non sequitur. Indeed, a nice person who truly believed that Islam was the sole pathway to heaven would do everything in his power to lead non-Muslims to submit to Allah… I have nothing against... Continue Reading

“The Puritans (as with Calvinists generally) affirmed the goodness and beauty of creation, believed in natural theology and natural law, recognized their evil as the problem in creation, and saw earthly desire as a foretaste of the ultimate good that Christ will one day fully satisfy.”   The common understanding of the Puritans, in both... Continue Reading

When you permit feelings in your heart of dislike and suspicion and disdain toward a person of a different skin color, you are blaspheming the majesty of the Creator God. You are denouncing the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. You are despising the shed blood of the cross. You are slandering the power of God... Continue Reading

Thus, the pastor preparing them to testify of their faith in Christ, so that they can be given the privileges of communicant membership by the elders and come to the Lord’s Supper, needs to approach them a little differently than someone who was converted out of the world as an adult. To that end, as... Continue Reading

I assumed that God needed to round out the blessings in my life with something hard. As though there is a limit to how many blessings he gives. As though there is a formula to how he works in my life. As though he is an impersonal God who gives out blessings and trials for... Continue Reading

And, as we can see from the passage cited above, it leads to the inevitable comparison of the Holy Spirit to the child of the divine husband (Father) and wife (Son). These parallels have far more in common with pagan mythology than Biblical theology. I am angry about this. This is a distortion of the... Continue Reading