As well as Puritanism as a whole having been intensively investigated over the past few decades, numerous studies of Puritan preaching have also come out. Nevertheless, none of these has investigated the Puritan view of the effectual call as it relates to the matter and manner of Puritan preaching. Boone has remedied this deficiency, researching [...]
Categorie: Christian doctrine
Thomas Watson and A Divine Cordial
Although Thomas Watson (c. 1620-1689) issued several most valuable books, comparatively little is known of him. We are not even sure about the exact dates of his birth and death. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Many puritan preachers received their education there. Emmanuel College was a nursery of preachers who stressed the absolute [...]
Systematic Theology: Grounded in Holy Scripture and understood in the light of the Church
Douglas F. Kelly is an American theologian. He was brought up in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the old Southern Presbyterian Church. When the Presbyterian Church in America in 1975 was formed, he joined this denomination. The invading of liberalism in the Southern Presby-terian Church, of which the acceptation of women in office [...]
Justification: The Central Article of Faith. A Biblical and Theological Analysis
Introduction The doctrine of justification is the article of faith that determines whether the church stands or falls. The church stands when she proclaims this God-honouring, soul-saving and liberating message and the church falls when she neglects to do so. The answer we give to the question, “how can we be just in the sight [...]
Human Nature in its Fourfold State
If there is one book that stands out more than others as representative of the best of the Scottish religious classics it is Human Nature in its Fourfold State. It met wide acceptance not only in Scotland, but also abroad. Already in the eighteenth century it was translated into Dutch. In this work Thomas Boston (1676-1732) [...]
Living in Truth. Unmasking the lies of our postmodern culture (2)
Materialism versus pilgrimage In pleading for the traditional family in this postmodern society, one of the major obstacles I encounter is the materialism and individualism that has so thoroughly permeated society. In postmodern thinking, the basic unit of society is assumed to be not the family but the individual. This individualism characterized Western society even [...]
Living in Truth. Unmasking the lies of our postmodern culture (1)
Introduction Our society is one typified as postmodern: it is a society that has left modernism behind it, at least in part. Modernism had its roots in the Renaissance and attained its full flowering in the Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as manʼs liberation from the dependency in which he had been [...]
Judgment according to Works in Romans
How must we understand what Paul writes in his letter about judgment according to work? How can we relate that to his message of justification by faith and not by the works of the law? In the last century several monographs were devoted to this subject. In the former century in New Testament scholarship a [...]
“Too Much to Grasp”: Exodus 3:13–15 and the Reality of God
An introduction to one of England’s greatest theologians
John Owen (1613-1683) is rightly regarded as one of the greatest theologians Britain ever produced. A.F Mitchell said that he was a genius and learning only second to Calvin. In him we see the not atypical combination of fervent puritan piety and reformed orthodoxy that uses scholastic termino-logy to clarify the message of the gospel. The last [...]