God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom are often thought to be in competition with one another in a sort of zero-sum game: either God is sovereign or I am free. This has led to thinking that there are only two basic options…
Having Your Treasures in God: Geerhardus Vos on the Eternal State
Teaching on the eternal state of the world to come may sound from the outset to be speculative and useless for practical living in the present. How can heavenly contemplation help me raise my children or motivate me at work…
The Enlightenment’s Splintering of Faith
The Reformation restored the holistic nature of faith to include both knowledge and trust in keeping with the organic unity of the whole person and our union with the whole Christ as taught in Scripture. These two elements, however, were…
Geerhardus Vos on the Personal and Active Faith of the Old Testament
The Westminster Larger Catechism defines justifying faith as a saving grace, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he, being convinced of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself…
The Reformation Restoration of Faith and True Religion
Saving faith is the instrument by which the whole person is united to the whole Christ in the unbreakable bond of the Holy Spirit. I am not my own, confesses the believer, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my…
[Book Review] Christ and Covenant Theology by Cornelis Venema
The doctrine of the covenant, in the words of Anthony Hoekema, is “the vertebrate structure which holds all the doctrines of Reformed theology together.”[1] The structural importance of the covenant for Reformed theology has given rise to areas of dispute and…
Geerhardus Vos on Christology and Covenant
In a previous post, we considered the way in which Geerhardus Vos’ doctrine of Christ impacted his redemptive-historical hermeneutic for reading the Old Testament. In the triune God’s eternal counsel of peace, the Son assumed his role as Mediator and…
Geerhardus Vos on Christology and Hermeneutics
I have been working through the third volume of Geerhardus Vos’ Reformed Dogmatics on Christology and have appreciated the implications he draws throughout for properly understanding the Old Testament revelation. This, however, should come as no surprise: our doctrine of Christ should impact…
The Office of Christ and the Authority of Preaching
There is no event in all the world that you can attend (no matter how expensive or exclusive the tickets are) that compares to the preaching of God’s Word every Sunday. Lectures, sporting events, concerts and plays are like feathers…
Hope: A Sure and Steadfast Anchor of the Soul
The Anchor of our Soul The author of Hebrews speaks of our hope as an anchor that has dug itself deep into heavenly ground behind the curtain where Christ has gone as our forerunner (Heb. 6:19–20). A forerunner, as Geerhardus Vos points…
