Crumbs from the Master's Table

I just finished Stephen Westerholm's  Justification Reconsidered . It's a cogent and concise overview of Paul's understanding of...

"Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." —J. Boswell, Life...

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you...

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and John Calvin (1509–1564), two of the world's most prominent pastor-theologians, speak eloquently to the ...

My gratitude to God, and esteem for  D. A. Carson , increases by the day. I'm  currently taking his course on Acts, Paul, and the Ge...

Speaking of the Corinthian correspondence: No part of the Pauline corpus more clearly illuminates the character of Paul the man, Paul the ...

Over at National Review, Mary Eberstadt has just penned an insightful piece on what is going on with feminism today. Please do have a  look ...

This  recent piece  by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic is easily the most helpful piece I've read on ISIS. While acknowledging fully that I ...

Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition , ca. 1436 For a concise exposition of this painting, see pages 65–69 in Art and Music : A Stude...

"A church full of people who are hungry to impress others and climb a little higher up the scales of social approval will not be a chur...

The following is what my wife Emily wrote yesterday as she reflected on the home-going of her grandpa Peter Wolfert: Today I’m thanking Go...

"Mission is the mother of all theology" (M. Kahler, as cited in Michael F. Bird, Introducing Paul,  20).

On his second missionary journey, Paul (with Silas) preached Jesus as the Christ with good effect in a synagogue of the Jews in Thessalonica...

What follows is a recent prayer offered up at New Covenant Church  in Naperville, IL . On the morning we prayed this corporate prayer, we w...

The meeting house where Edwards preached "Charity and Its Fruits" Jonathan Edwards' sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, preached ...

I'm slated to give my testimony ("pilgrim story," or "life story," as they call it) in my formation group at TEDS. A...

What follows is my all too brief attempt to trace out the kingdom of God theme as it unfolds in Scripture. Since this was produced for a gra...

"Teaching about the resurrection of Jesus is inadequate if it does not incorporate the notions of heavenly exaltation and eternal rule....

"In the ancient world, philosophy means something like what we mean by 'worldview.'" —D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, A...

Regarding Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions : Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles , Justin Taylor says this: "I wou...

The following is the corporate prayer we prayed at  New Covenant Church  this morning. It is shaped  by Jas. 1:13–25. The Prayers at NCC (...

How shall we interpret the book of James? Among other things that could be said (say, for example, about the genre of James), here is an imp...

 "A season calling for the exercise of our minds in thoughts of the omnipresence and omnisicence of God is made up of our solicitudes a...

Ray Ortlund thinks so. And explains how  here.   Here is a portion of that post: The liberal churches I’ve known are not openly hostile...

"One spiritual view of the divine goodness, beauty, and holiness, will have more efficacy to raise the heart unto a contempt of all ear...

J. C. Ryle: I am quite aware that Owen's writings are not fashionable in the present day. . . . Yet the great divine . . . [has] more ...

Stephen Dempster: Even though the prophets were preachers of repentance and social reform, it is wrong to think of them as the ancient equ...

"The gifts of the Spirit serve diverse means for a single end: to make visible the lordship of Jesus Christ as crucified and raised, an...

"Mark's opening verse makes the Gospel's purpose clear: 'The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God' (...

Vos:  This reliance of faith is not confined to the critical moments of life, it is to be the abiding, characteristic inner disposition of...

"In the new life which follows repentance the absolute supremacy of God is the controlling principle. He who repents turns away from th...

"Where the love of God is absent, there an idolatrous love of the world and of self enters, and a positively offensive and hostile atti...

"The Academy is a very large, self-authenticating plausibility structure, with the words Echo Chamber stenciled on the door." —Do...

"The gospel of Jesus the Messiah was born, then, in a land and at a time of trouble, tension, violence and fear. Banish all thoughts of...

Bad to the bone Bible. Bad to the bone pastor. Bad to the bone band. Bad to the bone  Bad to the bone B-B-B-B-Bad B-B-B-B-Bad ...

"I cannot think about the One without being instantly surrounded by the splendour of the Three, nor can I discern the Three without bei...

The following is the corporate prayer prayed at New Covenant Church  this morning. It is shaped by Tit. 2:11–14. The Prayers at NCC (11/30...

Doug Wilson: Evangelicals are nice, there is no getting around it. It is our besetting sin. That means about the worst thing you can tell ...

"The kingdom is a conception which must of necessity remain unintelligible and unacceptable to every view of the world and of religion ...

Geerhardus Vos answers why Jesus uses the language "kingdom of God" (when it was not used in the OT) and why we might be prone to ...

Hafemann: S. Douglas Birdsall, the executive director of the Lausanne Movement, has said in public presentations and private conversation ...

How shall we render   ἐντὸς ὑμῶν   in Lk. 17:21? The Holman Christian Standard Bible translates the phrase: “The kingdom of God is among y...

"The end why God suffers any corruption to be such a snare and temptation, such a thorn and brier, is to awaken the souls of men out of...

"What is called 'American civil religion' is the product of a failure of ecclesiology." —Peter J. Leithart, The Kingdom ...

Wilson: During our Sabbath dinner liturgy, the grandkids are asked a bunch of questions, and among the questions I ask are these—"Do ...

What is sentimentality ? My wife and I dislike it intensely, think it's all too common where it should be less common, and wish we could...

"There is absolutely nothing that God can give us that we are incapable of turning into an idol." —Douglas Wilson, Against the C...

In his stimulating book, The Bible and the Future , Anthony Hoekema, apparently following Karl Ludwig Schmidt ( TDNT 1:589), refers his re...

"The kind of biblicism that learns nothing from the great councils is in danger of becoming cultic." —D. A. Carson, Jesus the So...

How can one be sad and glad at the same time? Is that even possible? Isn't that a contradiction? No. No, it's not. Grace gets you th...

Luther two days before he died: Nobody can understand Virgil in his Bucolics , unless he has been a shepherd for five years. Nobody can un...

There are some today who desire to purge the church of any notion of a covenant of grace (for a traditional description of this covenant, se...

Many scholars, as many of you are no doubt familiar, have proposed a "center" to the whole Bible. There is nothing like consensus ...

Owen: Let us not mistake ourselves. To be spiritually minded is, not to have the notion and knowledge of spiritual things in our minds; it...

Rosner: What constitutes a god? Martin Luther's answer, as he reflected on the first commandment in his larger catechism, was "wh...

Carson: The kind of biblical theology that is profoundly grounded in tracing out the Bible's plot-line is intrinsically more likely to...

Luther: I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they fo...

D. A. Carson: THE STORY IS TOLD of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of the most influential preachers of the twentieth century. When he was dyin...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the editors of the Times of London asked several eminent writers to contribute pieces under ...

"What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble ...

Commenting on "she took . . . and ate" in Gen. 3:6, Derek Kidner says: "So simple the act, so hard its undoing. God will tast...

"The world we live in today puts more value on sea turtle eggs than on the human embryo" (R. C. Sproul, Everyone's a Theologia...

John Owen: It is a vain thing for any to suppose that they place their chiefest happiness in being for ever in the presence of Christ, who...

Christopher Wright comments on Gen. 3:22: God accepts that humans have indeed breached the Creator-creature distinction. No that humans ha...

Iain Provan: The fundamental idolatry described by the Bible lies also at the heart of the varied modern idolatries: the idolatry of the s...

In his influential popular-level book According to Plan , Graeme Goldsworthy comments on an unhappy development in Old Testament Studies: ...

In his course notes for a lecture on systematic theology that J. I. Packer gave in 2009 at Regent College, he says that "theology as an...

"[T]he central theme of Scripture is the kingdom of God defined simply as God's people in God's place under God's rule....

"Even a cursory survey indicates that each of the Gospels is firmly yet distinctively embedded in Israel's story through its respec...

"The only man who should be counted a real theologian is he who can build up men's consciences in the fear of God." —John Ca...

I cite Goldsworthy's judgment here with the utmost and highest esteem and approval: For a theologian to pursue a biblical theology imp...

In his justly praised and highly regarded  Biblical Theology : Old and New Testaments , Geerhardus Vos tells us what biblical theology is: ...

Whether Calvin believed in what came to be called in later Protestant theology "limited atonement" or "particular/definite re...

N. T. Wright writes:  In these ‘pastoral’ letters Paul regularly refers to Jesus with a title the Roman world used for Caesar: ‘saviour’. ...

Owen: It belongs unto the true notion of heaven, that it is a state wherein we shall be eternally freed from sin and all the concernments ...

Calvin: St. Paul tells us [2 Tim. 3:12] that anyone desiring to live a holy life in Jesus Christ must expect persecution. God, it is true,...

Calvin: Let us fight for the cause of righteousness, that is to say, for what is just. It is not enough to make an indiscriminate peace. T...

Calvin commenting on what it means to be a "peacemaker" in Matt. 5:9: Meekness is part of being peaceable. If we are patient, it...

J. Gordon McConville: The story of the prophetic books involves re-thinking who 'Israel' is. The prophets sometimes speak of a ...

Calvin: Helping others amounts to nothing unless we are moved by a love which comes from the heart, and which bids us bear our share of th...