Authority of the Bible
The Old Testament Written in the Blood of Christ: A Review of "The Seminary as a Textual Community: Exploring John Sailhamer’s Vision for Theological Education"
Some writing provokes joy in reading through beauteous prose or by bringing clarity to dense topics, but other literature is compelling because it pinpoints the questions that matter most. John Sailhamer’s writing is the latter sort. [...]
Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Platter traveled with five friends through Switzerland, stopping in a small village en route to St. Gallen to attend the Mass. After Vespers, the early evening service, one of the priests called them heretics because they had come from the city of Zurich, which no longer considered the pope […]
Does the Augsburg Confession Teach Anything Outside of Scripture? "Defensio Augustanae Confessionis" (Chapter X)
by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester This edition of Balduin’s 1623 work Defensio Augustanae Confessionis (Wittenberg: Paul Helwigius, 1623; fols. G4v–H4v) was a response to Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S. J. (1570–1637) and his Hungarian polemic against Protestants titled Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz (Wien: Posonban, 1613); other editions Bratislava (1623 and 1637) and Trnava (1766). Pázmány devotes six […]
an interview with Wageeh Mikhail Rev. Wageeh Mikhail (PhD) is the engagement director of ScholarLeaders International (ScholarLeaders.org). Prior to this role, Dr. Mikhail served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Christianity at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt. He has published and spoken widely on medieval Arab Christianity. Dr. Mikhail, please tell […]
William Twisse (1578–1646) wrote this work during his time as prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly (from 1643 until his death in 1646). This was his reply to a letter that had been anonymously written and sent to the assembly from Germany titled “A Perplexing Question and Doubtful Case of Conscience.” Though the letter claimed to […]
In 2020, InterVarsity Academic Press published an anthology on the history of evangelical biblicism titled Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. For this issue, Blake Adams interviewed Dr. Timothy Larsen, the editor of Every Leaf, Line, and Letter. Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at […]
A virtue of evangelicalism is its love and passion for the Bible. While it’s difficult to pin down what exactly evangelical means, cherishing the Bible almost always comes to mind.[1] But it’s not just evangelicals who should love the Bible. Christians—especially Reformed Christians—ought to love the Bible too. We ought to love it given its […]
Does the Augsburg Confession Teach Anything Outside of Scripture? "Defensio Augustanae Confessionis" (Chapter IX)
by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester In 1613, the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S.J. (1570–1637) published Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz. In Book 4 of this work, Pázmany devoted six chapters to a refutation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. In 1623, Lutheran theologian Friedrich Balduin published a direct response to Pázmany’s work, titled Defensio Augustanae […]
From early on, Christianity has been “a religion of the book.” Writing in the latter part of the second century, Irenaeus claimed: We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, […]
The answer to this question depends—not surprisingly—on what we mean by “fundamentalism.” As a religious designation, the term is just over a century old. Yet it never had just one meaning, and over the decades, these principal meanings have changed. So, to avoid confusion, we need to stay alert to these various meanings and be […]
I understand evangelicals when they wonder why we can’t communicate the gospel through methods more in tune with our culture. Preaching can seem boring or too formal and hardly able to compete with the entertainment we can so easily access. This, however, is not about novelty versus tradition. There is something much deeper in this […]
When one moves beyond the few stereotypical doctrines and the solas of Reformation theology into its riches and depth, there can be many surprises and discoveries, even on points we as evangelical Protestants thought we knew and understood. A good example is the word of God as it is proclaimed, which Lutheran and Reformed traditions […]
The executive editor of Modern Reformation, Joshua Schendel, recently talked with Dr. Michael Allen, who is the John Dyer Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Allen is the author of many articles and books, including Reformed Theology (T & T Clark, 2010) and, with his colleague Scott Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The […]
After declaring some hard teachings about God’s sovereignty in salvation, which provoked many of his followers to abandon him, Jesus in John 6 asked his closest disciples if they would also leave. Peter responded, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you […]
Just the other day I was asked why I thought the Bible—specifically, the New Testament as we have it today—is too small. “Too small?” I asked. “What do you mean?” My acquaintance had some vague recollection of watching a History Channel documentary that apparently showed that the mighty church (male dominated, of course) sought to […]
