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…
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…
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…
The Essential Van Til — His Relation to Scholasticism
Van Til used the word “scholasticism” (or its other variations) as shorthand for Thomistic dualism (and with it the medieval synthesis of Christian and pagan thought). In short Thomistic dualism is the idea that there are two sources of knowledge:…
[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…
The Essential Van Til — Common Grace and Common Wrath
The triumph of the eternal decree of God over history is just as much a problem as the triumph of history over the eternal decree. In an attempt to stave off Arminianism (a commendable task!) deniers of common grace have…
Herman Bavinck’s Trinitarian Worldview: A Brief Overview
The doctrine of the Trinity is the architectonic principle of the whole theological and apologetic enterprise of Herman Bavinck. While it may be debated as to how consistent he was in the application of this principle with his occasional nod…
