relationships and community on Fundamentalism

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

What is the greatest threat to the church of Jesus Christ today? There are so many threats to choose from. Some Christians would identify hazards like postmodern relativism working to unravel notions ...

Have you ever been bullied by a group? Or felt ganged up on? Maybe it wasn’t intended by them, but you felt abused? I have. So have some of the pastors and influencers we help. So has Jesus… Lord J...

Anti-Intellectualism has been a problem in the church for some time now. Consider the words of the 17th century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who had this to say about the role of reason in faith...

Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.

The man of pseudo-faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get in a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself w...

A theology which asserts that only the organized Church should be involved in mission, that theology has a very serious quarrel with history.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

We might say that convictions are firmly held moral or religious beliefs that guide our beliefs, actions, or choices…[M]ost Christians attach their convictions to Christ personally. In other words, we...

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is ti...

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, na...

It was this…intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you ...

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take a...

One particularly crafty, if not insidious way a “good works” righteousness can seep into our theology is by positioning faith as the pre-eminent work. We must never forget that faith itself is a...

In Guilt and Grace , Swiss physician and Christian, Paul Tournier, writes… I cannot study this very serious problem of guilt with you without raising the very obvious and tragic fact that rel...

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromis...

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for t...

If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

There is no mere world or matters of fact for covenant theology; there is always the wonder and duty to the concrete moment at hand, where God’s illimitable gift of life is given into our hands – to h...

It takes a great deal of freedom and love to be therapeutic with a group. Many years ago when Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, was lecturing in this country, it was reported that when he prea...

A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the compelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. This applies to virtually all faiths at some...

Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship with one another.

Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly in...

We can’t separate what we believe in the political arena from who we are in Christ and what obedience to God demands...That said, not every tenet of Christianity should become the law of the state. We...

Christian disunity is and remains a massive impediment to the gospel itself—the proclamation of which is and should be evangelicalism’s strong suit.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts a...

It was this…intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you ...