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Confessional Subscription -- A Recent Dissertation on an Important Subject

R.C. (Karlo) Janssen is the minister-elect of the Abbotsford Canadian Reformed Church just down the road from us here in Langley. He and I studied together (one year) at the CanRC seminary in Hamilton. After gra…
Louis Berkhof is Scholastic?

While I was still in university, a retired minister was downsizing and needed to get rid of a lot of his books. Word reached Edmonton and before long I was the thankful owner of a bunch of new (to me) books. Among them…
Premises for Reappraisal

In chapter 4 of After Calvin, Muller gives what I think is the most concise summary of his program for the reassessment of Protestant scholasticism. He provides eleven “premises of reappraisal”: 1. The question of c…
Protestant Orthodoxy and the Covenant

I’ve been reading Richard Muller’s After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition and also his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. This is very interesting material, especially as Muller deconstruc…
Scholastic Method and "Scholastic" as Pejorative

From time to time, I still hear Protestant scholasticism referred to in a demeaning fashion, as if it was one of the greatest evils ever foisted upon theology. The reality is that it provided much-needed definition and …
Praying to Christ

According to Jaroslav Pelikan (Credo, 169), the church father Origen at one point insisted that we may not pray to Jesus Christ because in the Lord's Prayer we are taught to pray to "Our Father." Pelikan goes on, "But E…
Abraham Kuyper on Psalms and Hymns

In 1911, Abraham Kuyper published his book on worship, Onze Eeredienst. It has recently been translated into English and published as Our Worship. In one of the early chapters, Kuyper deals with the subject of Psalms a…
Horton on Worship

The latest issue of Clarion has my review of Michael Horton's Christless Christianity. The only real complaint I had about it was his slight over-emphasis on the divine action/speech in public worship. I noted that he …
Jean Taffin: There is Salvation for You!

Jean Taffin (1529-1602) was a colleague of Guido de Bres, a pastor in the Reformed Churches in the southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium) and later a chaplain to William of Orange. In his book the Marks of God's Chi…
Infant Baptism and the Church

In People and Place, Michael Horton makes an excellent point about the relationship between infant baptism and one's doctrine of the church. As he does so, he draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer: One cannot help but observe a…