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    Delighting in the Trinity

    It’s a feeling every reader knows and loves, and perhaps especially the reader of theology. It is the feeling that comes as you read a book and find yourself thinking “This could change everything.” There are some books that go straight to what you think you know, what you are so sure of, what you’ve…

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    Five Verses on Adoption

    The word “adoption” (Greek huiothesias) occurs only a few times in the New Testament, and each time it refers to God choosing a people for himself. Though there are not a lot of references to this word, there is a good deal we learn from them about the doctrine of adoption. 1) God adopts those…

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    The Essential: Common Grace

    This is the sixth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, and Fall. Why is it that after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden and incurred the just penalty of death, they did not immediately die? What enabled them to go on living to…

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    The Work of Christ

    As Christians we make a big deal of the death of Jesus and rightly so because it is only through his death that we can be saved from our sin. But if all Jesus needed to accomplish before God was his death on the cross, he could have come to earth as an adult on…

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    Through the Jesus Lens

    It is one of Jesus’ more audacious claims–that all of the Scriptures testify to him. As Jesus appealed to the religious authorities of his day and as he exposed their ignorance, he declared that he himself is the subject of the Bible; he himself is the one all of the Old Testament Scriptures were pointing…

  • Reclaiming Adoption

    Each month Cruciform Press releases 1 new book, and our book for January is one we are very excited about. Reclaiming Adoption brings together some of today’s best thinkers on the subject of adoption, people like Dan Cruver (of Together for Adoption), John Piper, Scotty Smith, Richard Phillips and Jason Kovacs. Here is a description…

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    RCT: The Holiness of God (IX)

    We have just a few chapters left in our reading of R.C. Sproul’s classic book The Holiness of God. This week we come to chapter 9 which is titled, “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners,” a clear play on the title of Jonathan Edwards’ most famous or notorious sermon. Summary I hope no one…

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    Letters to a Young Calvinist

    There are many books out there that describe Reformed theology and that invite people to become part of the Reformed tradition. However, most of these books are a product of the years before the advent of this young, restless, Reformed reality that is all the rage today. Most such books predate the New Calvinism. New…

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    The Archer and the Arrow

    The Trellis and the Vine was 2009’s surprise hit (read my review). Written by Collin Marshall and Tony Payne, the book described a ministry mind-shift that the authors assured the reader could change everything–everything related to ministry, that is. The book stood upon its simple metaphor of a trellis, an apparatus used to support something,…

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    Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe

    Mark Driscoll must be a busy guy. As if his ministry at Mars Hill isn’t enough to keep him busy every hour of the day, he has also written a long line of books, the most recent of which is titled simply Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. Like several of his previous volumes, this one…

  • The Dim Mirror

    Have you ever considered what it must have been like for Adam and Eve to walk and talk with God in the Garden of Eden? Have you thought of the things you might say to God if you were to hear his footsteps today? What Christian hasn’t experienced a pang of jealousy when he reads…

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    The Message Behind the Method

    This morning I’ve got Whitefield and Wesley on my mind. This morning I was thinking about John Wesley’s infamous and divisive sermon called Free Grace and went looking for what I had written on it in the past. This was the sermon that began a significant rift between Whitefield and the Wesleys, for not only…

  • Ruined for Anything Else

    Aileen and I were once members of a church that, after a few years of existence, began to de-emphasize doctrine. Some of the pastors seemed to reach the conclusion that “doctrine divides” and that the church really just needed to focus on evangelism and on “action.” They seemed to determine that a sound theological foundation…

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    Dug Down Deep

    Can you believe it’s been five years since we last saw a new book from Josh Harris (assuming we don’t count the re-titling and re-release of Not Even a Hint / Sex Is Not the Problem, Lust Is)? His last book was Stop Dating the Church which released all the way back near the end…

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    Book Review – “Forgotten God” by Francis Chan

    Calling the Holy Spirit “Forgotten God” may be a bit of an overstatement. Or perhaps it is an understatement. Some Christians seem to show little evidence that they have any theology of the Spirit while others seem to emphasize the Spirit at the expense of other biblical doctrine. What seems clear is that few Christians…

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    Book Review – Justification and Regeneration

    At the very heart of the gospel, at the very heart of the Christian faith, are two great miracles, two inseparable miracles, through which a dead man is brought to life. The first miracle is justification; here a condemned sinner is made right in the eyes of a perfect judge. The second miracle is regeneration;…

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    Outrageous Mercy

    Martin Luther got it right when he said, “No theology is genuinely Christian which does not arise from and focus on the cross.” The cross of Christ is the very center point of the Christian faith; indeed, it is the very focal point of all of history. No event will or can be more significant…

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    The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God

    Until I read this book I would not have considered God’s love as a particularly difficult doctrine. The Trinity is a difficult doctrine to understand, impossible even. The eternal nature of God–that is another difficult or impossible one. But the love of God? I wouldn’t have thought of it as such. But this book convinced…

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    Book Review – Unfashionable

    Every now and again I pick up a book that I feel I should really enjoy. And yet, for one reason or another, it simply does not “click.” Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian is just such a book. It has been widely praised by Christians I respect and its six (!) pages of endorsements contain a…

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    Book Review – Christ and the Future

    Cornelius Venema’s The Promise of the Future, published in 2000 by Banner of Truth, has been hailed as the most important major Reformed study in biblical eschatology since Anthony Hoekema’s The Bible and the Future (published in 1972). It is not coincidental, I am sure, that Venema is a former student of Hoekema. The Promise…