A Brief G. Vos Bio and BT Lesson

Offer Good While Supplies Last: First 300 Episodes of Christ the Center

The Reformed Forum has been a tremendous blessing to me and I'm certain to a vast number of other people who have desired and continue to desire the cultivation of the historic, Reformed faith.

I have found it a privilege to be able to actually converse with some of the program's pillars, like Jared Oliphint, Jeffrey Waddington and Jim Cassidy online, asking them questions now and again (Camden Bucey is somewhat harder to accost. LOL).

Now the guys have decided to offer the first 300 episodes of the famed Christ the Center program for free as a single download. For directions, go here.

Rev. Allen Vander Pol on the Doctrine of Scripture at PCovRC

Dr. K. Scott Oliphint, in this wonderful ReformedForum broadcast entitled, Nature and Scripture, remarked that the Reformation's chief contribution, arguably, is the regrounding of epistemology on Scripture.

In line with this, Rev. Allen Vander Pol of Miami International Theological Seminary will be conducting a seminar at Pasig Covenant Reformed Church on the doctine of Scripture entitled, "That Word Above All Earthly Powers."

This is a FREE seminar on a very important topic, so you wouldn't want to miss it!

Westminster Wednesday: Is History Important? True, Man!

Dr. Carl Trueman makes the case here.

I haven't finished going through the whole piece, but what I've read thus far has convinced me of its blog-worthiness.

Michael Horton on PCovRC's 3rd Anniversary

In celebration of Pasig Covenant Reformed Church's 3rd Anniversary, Dr. Michael Horton, in typical gracious fashion, offered up the following words of edification:

We are cordially inviting everyone to come and share this day with us. See details here.

Westminster Wednesday: Trueman on a Much-Abused Phrase

Anti-confessionalists almost always have this phrase, "semper reformanda," ready on their lips. As a justifying smokescreen for almost every innovation in the area of church polity, worship, preaching, evangelism, etc., it really is anemic.

The thing that strikes me as funny is that so much of this has been going on for quite a while now that the impetus behind the movement has all but been negated. Wanting to shed the outmoded garb of "traditionalism," these trendy churches are now the norm, and people are finding out that it really does not deliver. Being different is now the "tradition," and like the man who built his house on sand, the inevitability of collapse is undeniable.

Carl Trueman reminds us that the church is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord" (Eph. 2:20, 21), thereby historic, catholic, and Reformed (ad fontes!).

The Coolest of the Reformed Cats

Notice the prominent foreheads? A chief requirement of Reformed coolness.

Turretin was probably wearing a wig or decided on the "heavy metal" look—still within the bounds of cool. LOL.

Triperspectivalism and the Heretical Fringe

I decided to inform myself about John Frame's triperspectivalism using his own primer found here.

The impression that I got is that his method seeks to find a Trinitarian imprint to everything in reality. I would certainly agree with the premise that all of creation is indelibly marked with Trinitarianism in that the One-and-the-Many, evidenced in the universal-particulars relationship found in every created object, is a creaturely analogization of the mystery of God as being One and Three Persons. However, the aspect of Frame's take on this that rubs me wrong is that (based on my understanding of his proposition) if the complete picture view of truth (exhaustive) is only available to God, then the ectypal truth available to the creature (man) must consist in "perspectives" that cannot claim to be the single body of ectypal truth delivered to man, but that the various perspectives contribute to the apprehension of this true ectypal corpus.

In other words, my particular take on truth is always incomplete and necessitates that I engage the truth perspectives of others in order to progressively arrive at complete ectypal veracity. The implications on the Reformed creeds and confessions cannot be missed. Frame states,

"So I think that perspectivalism is an encouragement to the unity of the church. Sometimes our divisions of theology and practice are differences of perspective, of balance, rather than differences over the essentials of faith. So perspectivalism will help us better to appreciate one another, and to appreciate the diversity of God's work among us."

What I hear him saying is that the Reformed consensus is just a perspective among others, and that we would do well perhaps to hearken to the likes of Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Rob Bell, etc. in order to progressively arrive at unified Christian truth. But then how would error be spotted? The determination of heterodoxy must necessarily be predicated on a perspective as being the only perspective. If he claims this as "the essentials," then by what overarching perspectival standard did he arrive at this delimiting conclusion?

His threefold division of normative (God's revelation), situational (objects, the created order), and existential (man in interaction with the former two) is well and good, in my opinion, but then the permutation of this triperspectivalism, as applied by him, into multiperspectives that are each given credence does give rise to a pluralism that is dangerous and precisely what the Reformed creeds and confessions were meant to curb.

Next to the Bible, What Is the Second Most Important Book?

According to Carl Trueman, it is J. Gresham Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, a book that tackled an issue that will stay an issue up until the eschaton finally breaks in.

My "Testimony"

I'm sure we've all witnessed this peculiar aspect of broad evangelicalism wherein people go up the stage in order to narrate their own personal "testimonies." Usually, this would consist in the person having received some blessing, either positively or negatively (the former taking the form of additional assets, the latter rescue from loss).

While proclaiming the goodness of the Lord in our lives to others is warranted, it should always be remembered that our lives are not the Gospel, and that we should not fall into the seeker-sensitive mistake of assuming that our "attractive" lives are enough to snatch others from the flames apart from the doctrinal preaching of the person and work of Christ.

With that said, allow me to direct you to my own personal "testimony"—my journey from error into the historic, catholic, and confessionally Reformed faith:


Truly Reformed

The Joy of Being Confessionally Reformed

Hidden Treasure

Proud to Be a Member of Pasig Covenant Reformed Church

Who Did John Calvin Consider as His Father in the Faith?

Martin Bucer.

A Primer on Francis Turretin

Francis Turretin is arguably the greatest Protestant Scholastic of the 17th century.

What is scholasticism?

"A discourse is 'scholastic' only when it follows scholastic method–specifically, only when it concentrates on (1) identifying the order and pattern of argument suitable to technical academic discourse, (2) presenting an issue in the form of a thesis or question, (3) ordering the thesis or question suitably for discussion or debate, often identifying the 'state of the question,' (4) noting a series of objections to the assumed correct answer, and then (5) offering a formulation of an answer or an elaboration of the thesis with due respect to all known sources of information and to the rules of rational discourse, followed by a full response to all objections. When that form or its outlines are not observed in a work, that work is not scholastic. By way of example, Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae is certainly a scholastic work–but his commentary on the Gospel of John is not, even though its content stands in strong and clear relation to the content of the Summa. Another example, taken from a place somewhat closer to home: Ursinus's Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism is, arguably, scholastic. The catechism itself is clearly not–even though the theological content of the catechism closely reflects that of the commentary written on it" (Richard Muller, After Calvin, 26 [found at Richard Muller on 'What Makes Something Scholastic?'])

Who was Francis Turretin?

Irrationalism, QIRE, and Challies

In this recent blog post, mega-blogger Tim Challies reports of another reason for why he left a confessionally Reformed church in favor of an Anabaptist one, this time the rationale being that the former did not have a strong "evangelistic" suit, born, he claims, out of a seemingly deeply-ingrained distaste for the unregenerate.

While his criticism may indeed be valid, his reaction of going from the context of strong, historical, and Reformed confessionalism to the converse does not share the same quality. In fact, I would say that it is irrational. If irrationalism is the claim that all that is true are the particulars around us, and that there are no universals that dictate upon how particulars operate, then Challies' subsequent embracing of more "feely," experience-driven Anabaptism fits the bill of irrationalism very nicely.

While it is possible for him to assert that the confessionally Reformed faith lacks the quality of "universal" (archetypal), based on biblical theological grounds, it is more likely that the reason he "jumped ship" is that, experientially, he was not being satisfied. This reminds me of Dr. R. Scott Clark's QIRE (Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience):

"QIRE is then the practical dimension of QIRC. It denies that God mediates His interaction with man through the means of grace, namely, the preaching of the gospel and the sacraments. It posits that man is able to connect with God apart from the institutions that God has ordained in Scripture, thereby blurring the Creator-creature distinction. It is easy to spot more glaring instances of this error in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, but subtle variations also occur in the spiritual disciplines advocacies of many notable figures that are common in supposedly Reformed circles." (Underdog Theology, BOOK REVIEW: Recovering the Reformed Confession (Our Theology, Piety, and Practice) by R. Scott Clark—Chapter I, 'Whatever Became of Reformed Theology, Piety, and Practice?' PART 1)

While Challies' regression from Reformed confessionalism to Anabaptism is lamentable, the blessing that his wisdom has afforded many, through his blog and books, is definitely laudable.

The Reformed and the Pitbull

This blog post here further reinforces the parallelism between being truly Reformed (Confessionally Reformed) and the Pitbull in that, though intrinsically endowed with exquisite virtue, a mental malignancy brought on by misconception and misinformation has served to mar the reputations of both, especially in the area of "niceness."

Another point of parallelism here.

And Dr. R. Scott Clark talks about "Reformed niceness" here.

(A 2004 or 2005 breeding)

What If Manny Pacquiao Was Reformed?

Another win for the Pacman and it seems like there's no end in sight. His boxing victories have made him a household name internationally, secured for him a position in the Philippine government as a Congressman, and fattened his wallet astronomically—so much so that to say he is wealthy is like saying Jughead loves hamburgers (ain't it obvious?! LOL).

A Primer on Guido de Brès, Father of the Belgic Confession

After reading through his letter to his wife, and after having the fact of his faith that expressed itself in martyrdom hit home further, I now have a "man crush" on Guido de Brès.

Reproduced below is a brief biography:

The Love Letter of All Love Letters: Guido de Brès to His Wife

This year marks the 450th anniversary of the framing of the Belgic Confession. This historic church document is unique in that it is the only one of its kind written by a martyr—Guido de Brès.

Knowing of his impending martyrdom, de Brès wrote a letter to his wife that I can only describe as probably the best love letter that I've ever read: God-glorifying, God-dependent, full of faith and assurance, full of Scriptural truths, and expressing the kind of selfless love that a husband must have for his wife (in imitation of Christ's love for His Bride, the Church).

Doing Church

Contrast the rantings of this "young, restless, and reformed," Emergent type on his ideals for "doing church" with this treatment of the marks of a true church by Dr. R.S. Clark.

There are three marks of a true church:

1.) The whole counsel of God is preached (Law and Gospel).

2.) The sacraments are faithfully administered.

3.) Discipline is enforced among the membership.

The YRR guy may claim compliance to the first two marks, but his 8th point leaves more to be desired as it relates to the third mark:

"8. If you think this will be a nice little church that stays the same size, where everybody knows your name and you have my cell number on speed dial and we have a picnic lunch together every week (By God’s grace, we want to grow)."

How can discipline be enforced in the form of submission to the rule of elders, as these elders dispense of their God-ordained duties, when anonymity is encouraged and accountability frowned upon? He says they want to grow? By growth it seems is meant the bursting at the seams in terms of population when genuine fellowship then proves impossible.

He does get one thing right, though: I certainly wouldn't want to join his church.

The Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification

Did the Reformers then have any doctrine of sanctification? Of course they did. We are all familiar with the biblical announcements as to what is involved in sanctification: the Word, the sacraments, prayer, fellowship, sharing the gospel, serving God and neighbor. And the Reformation tradition acknowledges that there are biblical texts that speak of sanctification as complete already. This is not a perfection that is empirical or observable, but a definitive declaration that because we are "in Christ," we are set apart and reckoned holy by his sacrifice (1 Cor. 1:30; Heb. 10 and so on). Anybody who is in Christ is sanctified, because Christ's holiness is imputed to the Christian believer, just as Jesus says in John 17:19, "For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified." God sees the believer as holy. That means that Wesley should not have terrified Christian brethren with texts such as, "Without holiness, no one will see the Lord." The Christian is holy; it is all imputed. And then there are texts such as, "Be holy as I am holy." What would the Reformers do with that? They would say we are called to be holy. But why should we be holy if we are already perfect in Christ? Because we are saved unto good works, not unto licentiousness, according to Romans 6; the question has been asked before. Good works are done out of thankfulness of heart by the believer who has been saved, not by one who is trying to be saved.

Clearly the Reformers had a doctrine of sanctification. They believed that the law in the Bible has three uses. First, it is a civil ordinance to keep us from stealing each other's wives, husbands, and speedboats. The civil use of the law applies to the whole of culture. Second, the theological use of the law is to reveal our sin and drive us to despair and terror so that we will seek a savior. Luther believed that is a primary use of the law in all of Scripture. But the Reformers also believed in a third use of the law, and that is a didactic use, to teach the Christian God's will for holy living.

If a Christian is reading the law and says, "This is not yet true of me: I don't love God with all my heart, and I certainly don't love my neighbor as I love myself. In fact, just today I failed to help a poor man on the side of the road who was having car trouble. I must not yet be a Christian, " here the Reformers would counsel, "You hurry back to the second use of the law and flee to Christ where sanctification is truly, completely, and perfectly located." After this experience, the believer will feel a greater sense of freedom to obey, and this is the only way that one will ever feel free to obey. The difference between all Higher Life movements and the Reformation perspective finally turns on the question of what Baptists call the assurance of salvation and what the Reformers called fides reflexa (reflexive faith). The answer of the Higher Life movement to the struggling Christian is, Surrender more, or, What are you holding back from the Lord? The Reformation answer is different.

A friend of mine was walking down a street in Minneapolis one day and was confronted by an evangelical brother who asked, "Brother, are you saved?" Hal rolled his eyes back and said, "Yes." That didn't satisfy this brother, so he said, "Well, when were you saved?" Hal said, "About two thousand years ago, about a twenty minutes' walk from downtown Jerusalem."

The most important thing to remember is that the death of Christ was in fact a death even for Christian failure. Christ's death saves even Christians from sin. There is always "room at the cross" for unbelievers, it seems. But what we ought to be telling people is that there is room there for Christians, too. This, then, is what was meant earlier by the motif of law—gospel—law in many evangelical circles. The law condemns, driving us to Christ the gospel, from whom we receive both instantaneous justification and progressive sanctification for the rest of our lives, according to the Reformation perspective. While the law still guides, it can never make threats. But in contemporary evangelicalism, the law can come back to undermine the confidence of the gospel. It can still make threats; it can still condemn. There is wonderful grace for the "sinner," and the evangelical is at his best in evangelism. But the question as to whether there is enough grace for the sinful Christian is an open one in many gatherings, and I have had many students tell me, "My last state is worse than the first. I think I've got to leave the faith because feel worse now than I did before." I have had people come up to me after I had spoken and tell me, "This is about the last shot I've got. My own Christian training is killing me. I can understand how, before I was a Christian, Christ's death was for me, but I am not at all sure that his death is for now because I have surrendered so little to him and hold so much back. My trouble really began when I committed myself to Christ as Lord and Savior." That perversion can be the result of pastoral teaching, Sunday school curriculum, and the declarations of evangelical Christian leaders.

Instead, there must be a clear and unqualified pronouncement of the assurance of salvation on the basis of the fullness of the atonement of Christ. In other words, even a Christian can be saved. The other "gospel," in its various forms (Higher Life, legalism, the "carnal Christian" teaching, and so on) is tearing us to pieces. I must warn you that the answer to this devastating problem is not available on every street corner. It is available only in the Reformed tradition. This is not because that particular tradition has access to information other traditions do not possess. Rather, it is because the same debate that climaxed in that  sixteenth-century movement has erupted since in less precise form. In fact, since Christ's debates with the Pharisees and Paul's arguments with the legalists, this has been the debate of Christian history. At no time since the apostolic era were these issues so thoroughly discussed and debated, as they were in the sixteenth century. To ignore the biblical wisdom, scholarship, and brilliant insights of such giants as the Reformers is simply to add to our ignorance the vice of pride and self-sufficiency. The Reformation position is the real evangelical position.

The only way out is an exposition of the Scriptures that has to do with law and gospel—an exposition of the Scriptures that places Christ at the center of the text for everybody, including the Christian. All of the Bible is about him. All of the Bible is even about him for the Christian!

I used to tell my students at an evangelical Christian college that they had never heard real preaching, with the exception of a few sound evangelistic appeals. Their weekly diet in the congregation was not, as it should have been, a proclamation of God's grace to them because of the finished and atoning death of Christ—God's grace for them as Christians. That emphasis is desperately needed. And the only way to find that kind of preaching is to go back to when it was done, and it was done in the sixteenth century. The real hope for the church in the West, humanly speaking, lies with evangelicals. Barring an unusual act of God, the mainline churches are not going to get the church back on its feet. Generally speaking, they simply do not have a high enough view of the inspiration of Scripture to listen to it anymore.

The evangelicals do. They believe that the Scriptures are true, but tend to read them as a recipe book for Christian living, rather than for the purpose of finding Christ who died for them and who is the answer to their unchristian living. We must have that kind of renewal, and it can only come from the evangelicals. The evangelical movement in America must begin reading from the Reformers instead of pretending that they are committed only to the Bible, without any system of doctrine, when it is clear what books, tapes, and sermons have shaped their faith and practice. Another thing we are going to have to re-examine in connection with Christian growth is the question of the sacraments—not sacramentalism, but the very nature of the sacraments (baptism and the Lord's Supper), which receives far more attention in the Scriptures than in contemporary evangelical discussion and piety. We are going to have to talk about them again. The major themes of the Reformers are precisely the ones the evangelical must be encouraged to recover.

— Rod Rosenbladt, "Conclusion, Christ Died for the Sins of Christians, Too," Christ the Lord (The Reformation and Lordship Salvation), ed. Michael Horton (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1992), 204—208 (italics original).

Jonathan Edwards, a Good Yardstick of Reformed Orthodoxy? Nah!

Given the recent wave of sentiment (mostly negative) over John Piper's endorsement of Rick Warren—with the former's thumbs up chiefly predicated on the latter's supposed interest in Jonathan Edwards—I have compiled the following quotes which will serve to cast light on some of Edwards' elemental beliefs:

"One suspects, however, that confessional Reformed folk might not be so ready to identify with Edwards' theology if they understood its debt to modernity and specifically to certain forms of rationalism and idealism." — Dr. R. Scott Clark, 'Recovering the Reformed Confession', p. 84.

"Charles Hodge (1797—1878) offered strong criticism of Edwards's doctrine of original sin and 'continued creation.' Hodge said, 'According to the theory of continued creation there is and can be no created substance in the universe. God is the only substance in the universe.' He concluded that this 'doctrine, therefore, in its consequences, is essentially pantheistic.'" — ibid., p. 85

"He rejected the traditional Reformed doctrine of concursus, that God works fully in every thing but does so through 'second causes' (WCF 5.2), which led to his occasionalism whereby the world is said to be re-created (which notion the earlier Reformed orthodox had rejected) moment by moment." — ibid., p. 87.

"...the measure of one's ministry was no longer whether a minister proclaimed the law and the gospel and administered the means of grace according to Scriptures as understood by the Reformed confessions. Rather, the measure of one's ministry was now the result of that preaching...specifically the degree to which it generated a certain religious enthusiasm or experience." — ibid., p. 89.

"Because of his neo-Platonism, Edwards established an ideal, a paradigm of conversion and religious experience, to be wrought not only progressively by the ordinary means of grace, but immediately by the Spirit." — ibid., p. 93.

"For Edwards, true religion was not simply an orthodox profession of faith...accompanied by an ordinary Christian life lived in the communion of the saints. But he demanded more, an extraordinary experience of grace...Attention is no longer on the objective work of Christ for his people and the secret but ordinary work of the Spirit in his elect through the Word and sacraments." — ibid., pp. 94—95.

"Edwards taught a doctrine of divinization. The only thing missing is the word itself." — Michael J. McClymond, 'Salvation and Divinization: Jonathan Edwards and Gregory Palamas and the Theological Uses of Neoplatonism'.