Everybody Loves Bavinck
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“How a Dutch neo-Calvinist thinker became the latest Christian theologian-du-jour.” - C.Today
Don’t Skip Theology’s Middle Ground
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“It’s true that evangelical Christians and churches need to get back to the riches of the earliest Christian theology. Gavin Ortlund makes an eloquent case for this in his book Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future” - TGC
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Why We’re Still Confronting the Same Christmas Heresy as St. Nick
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“Saint Nicholas, a historical precursor figure for Santa Claus, is said to have attended the First Council of Nicea in A.D. 325… Additional legends assert Nicholas became so enraged by the comments of Arius, who taught Jesus was not equal to God the Father, he slapped Arius across the face.” - Lifeway
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Can Thomas Aquinas save us from (post)modernism?
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“One of the more common mischaracterizations is that Thomas Aquinas is a pure rationalist who subverts the Scriptures at the expense of his philosophical musings. Contrary to this narrative, Aquinas was a man who was steeped in the Scriptures. For Thomas, the love of God is more important than the knowledge of God, even though both are absolutes.” - Credo
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Historical Theology for the Church – a review
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“Sixteen authors contribute essays dealing with specific topics through four major periods of church history, including the editors, Duesing and Finn. As mentioned, Duesing provides the introduction and Finn adds a conclusion to complete the work.” - Don Johnson
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Bavinck on Historical Criticism: The Search for the Essence of Christianity
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“Bavinck critiques historical criticism as not really historical in the sense of being merely an open-minded search for truth. It is instead the re-telling of history according to a different philosophical axioms and different theological doctrines.” - Credo
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Penal Substitution in the Early Church
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“The first error, which is the most common among scholars, is to suggest that the early church never spoke of penal substitution, which I hope to dispel. The second error, more common among evangelicals, is to overstate the case and read penal substitution into texts.” - TGC
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Book Review: "Historical Theology In-Depth" by David Beale
David Beale, a longtime professor of historical theology at BJU Seminary, published his two-volume Historical Theology In-Depth in 2013. This is an outstanding work, and every pastor and interested Christian should use it as the “go to” text for a foundational explanation of key themes in historical theology.
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"[N]o one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek"
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“The church has misread Paul so severely, it seems, that no one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek in graduate school.” Surprised by N.T. Wright
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Book Review - Ancient Christian Doctrine 1: We Believe in One God
Mention the “Church Fathers” and “Roman Catholicism” will likely spring to the minds of many pew-warming (and some pulpit-filling) evangelicals and fundamentalists. Let’s face it, for many Protestants, Christian history begins in 1517 with Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. The fourteen hundred years of Christian history spanning Revelation to the Reformation is often foggy and remote. So large a lacuna in Christians’ understanding of the development of foundational doctrines makes them easy prey for Dan Brown, Bart Ehrman and their insidious ilk, who are eager to fill the vacuum with lies and innuendo about suppressed gospels and altered manuscripts. Series editor Thomas Oden notes, “To the extent Christians today ignore the ancient rule of faith, they remain all the more vulnerable to these distortions” (p. xiv). Diagnosing the problem is half the battle: what can be done to remedy it?
A helpful corrective (even if not a silver bullet) has come in the five-volume Ancient Christian Doctrine series published by IVP Academic in 2009. The series is self-described as “a collection of doctrinal definitions organized around the key phrases of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (commonly called simply The Nicene Creed) as viewed by the foremost ancient Christian writers” (p. vii). Those ancient Christian writers include the disciples of the original disciples and those disciples who pressed on the work in the years spanning AD 95 through 750.
Despite the fact that eminent Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin were steeped in the Church Fathers, that fertile ground was, over the intervening centuries, ceded to Catholicism (at least by the rank and file churchgoers outside the academy). Catholic writers, most notably Mike Aquilina, have in recent years produced dozens of accessible works that have successfully popularized patristics for a predominantly Catholic audience. These treasured writings predating the Schism and the Reformation nonetheless remain a blind spot for many non-Catholics. Oden acknowledges this unfortunate fact when noting “the evangelical tradition is far more famished for their sources, having been longer denied sustenance from them” (p. xvi).
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