Before the Fall, we were all artists and poets
“Can our churches be beautiful again, and not just promote goodness and truth?... It’s one thing to make our work, our business, our arts and our political endeavors good and even ‘successful.’ It’s another to aspire to make them beautiful. It’s one thing to try educate and raise our children to be good and ‘successful,’ but it’s another to try to raise them to be beautiful.”
Listen in as we sit down with Makoto Fujimura, author of, “Art + Faith: A Theology of Making” and discuss the living and beautiful reality of God and His image bearers. Makoto gives no quarter mere Theology-as-a-hobby or for a truncated Gospel (or “plumbing theology”). In sitting down with Makoto we don’t get novel and new, rather, we get the original telos and tangibles that concern the implications of creation and new creation. This interview is for humans seeking full humanity.
By Steve Bishop
There is a wide range of varieties of what has loosely been termed Calvinistic philosophy. This family tree is an attempt to identify some of these strands and their relationships. Inevitably, it is an oversimplification...
He Named things We Pastors, Creatives and Rank-and-Files Couldn’t Name
“The Bible became alive to Him, it was not as some Elizabethan artifact but as a living book, appropriate for the gritty lives of butchers, cement layers, radio-preaching mothers, and the drunks who lounged in the alley behind his father’s Butcher shop. People around the world were picking up books with his name on it--picking them up and sensing they’d found a voice that spoke their language. Vast numbers of readers recognized in Eugene’s words a hunger they’d forgotten, a craving for an authentic encounter with God. They were hungry for a vision calling them into the wondrous expanse of a life that honored what it meant to be a beloved (yet finite) human living under the mercy of God. They found all this in the words of Eugene Peterson.”
The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck
Listen in as we sit down with Dr. Bruce Pass and discuss his book “The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck”. Here we are guided by the hand of Bavinck and Dr. Pass into a Theology that is no mere academic hobby but where Theology is a living-being animated by true religion. Like a heart this living-being pumps blood and life to the needed areas in the body. Dr. Pass shows us how Bavinck’s though that, much like the Universe is the center of the solar “system”, Christ is the center of the Christian theological system.
By Steve Bishop
Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck were the main instigators of the movement that became known as neo-Calvinism, however, they stood on the shoulders of others. One of these was Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876). Harry van Dyke describes him as a “godfather” to both Kuyper and Bavinck; and Bratt describes him as “something of a surrogate father to Kuyper”. He was visited by several abolitionists from Britain. They had heard of his ideas for social reform, they hoped he would become “Holland’s Wilberforce”. Many of Groen’s embryonic ideas were taken up and developed by Kuyper...
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Robert White (translator of the 1541 edition) on why Christians should read "The Institutes of the Christian Religion"
Faith cannot exist without knowledge, but knowledge by itself is neither saving faith nor transforming faith. Doctrine must descend from the head to the heart and take root there. It must, under God, change the way we think, feel, will and act; it must change the kind of people we...
Dr Les Hardin
I don’t want the chicken nuggets—the better parts chopped up, compressed, and given to me in bite-size portions. What’s more, I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s content with that—the little bits, un-nutritious, unfulfilling. I want the whole meal. I want to be the kind of person...
Reading the Bible Literally
Join us as we interview Dr John Walton (professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and one of the world's most prominent scholars and voices on Ancient near east background to the Bible) with crucial questions like 1. How do we read/interpret the creation account (literal 24 hours or something...
by Michael R. Wagenman
Knowing about Abraham Kuyper will give your discipleship the nuance and complexity required to effectively discern how to bear witness to Christ in our diverse and secular culture today.
That prayer is most likely to pierce heaven which first pierces one’s own heart
We are a long way from these people. Many years have passed. Culture has changed. People have changed. Or have they? My prayer is that we would read these prayers and realize how alike we are. We still have the same kinds of needs... The Puritans had trouble paying the...
Interview with Ken M. Penner
In the world of Jesus and Paul it was more common to speak more than one language. The words of Jesus and Paul are of course recorded in the New Testament in Greek. But that doesn’t mean Jesus said everything in Greek...
Interview with Richard Mouw
The importance of worldviewish thinking comes with the realization that while he is a personal Savior he is also more than that. We must also know him as the Lord and King over all things. This is what Abraham Kuyper captured so well when he said that every square inch...
Calling to The Deep from The Shallows: For Christians Who Don’t Read The Bible
The Bible of my grandfather rests prominently atop the filing cabinet in my central-Florida office. Leslie Ewell Clinkenbeard (“Pa” to his family) was a simple farmer and mechanic, but served the church faithfully as an elder for over 40 years. Four preachers officiated his funeral...
Interview with Sean Cole
I’m a very task-oriented person and I resonate with being told what to “do” in order to “get busy” serving Jesus. I didn’t have that great of a grasp on who I was in Christ. In seminary, one of my professors heavily emphasized “being before doing” and that has stuck...