I recently read an old (1990s) pamphlet written by Bible Presbyterian minister G. W. Fisher titled “Should Morality Be Legislated.” It was a valuable read, well thought out, and fair in explaining the positives and negatives of legislating morality. His major conclusion in the final section titled “So What Is The Church To Do?” was …
In 1979 Covenant Seminary professor J. Barton Payne died from a fall while climbing Mt. Fuji on sabbatical in Japan. In 1996 Denver Seminary professor Bob Alden died of a heart attack shortly after hiking in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I had learned about each of these cases some years ago, but conflated them …
The hiking deaths of two Old Testament professors. Read More »
Things got busy in 2021! So while I read around 100 books a year each of the last few previous years, in 2021 I managed to read only 27 books. What happened? Well, in July my wife gave birth to our second child (and first son, Birch). While Birch has been generally a smiley boy …
This is entirely my own definition; I think of homesteading as a situation where you have a property that somehow makes you some money rather than you merely paying rent or a mortgage on it. It is not necessarily the case that the property “pays for itself.” Even if you can make a few hundred …
I have often seen Christians doubt their salvation because of concerns over whether they have sufficiently repented of their sins. Their mindset is something like this: “I’m told I must repent to be saved, but I keep sinning, therefore I must not be saved.” This mindset, however, generally misunderstands the nature of Biblical repentance and …
[From a letter of J. Oliver Buswell Jr. to John W. Sanderson Jr., October 19, 1940] “Note that I am in the habit of using the word ‘dispensationalism’ to refer to that doctrine which teaches that certain portions of the Scripture are ‘on legal ground,’ or in other words that in certain parts of the …
[I find Buswell’s comment here interesting since his friend Gordon Clark would make the same argument (that Barth is hopelessly contradictory) in his 1963 book “Karl Barth’s Theological Method.” Buswell is making that argument a decade earlier in this quote from 1950 in “The Bible Today”, June-September 1950, p. 261-262.] “Barth is always changing. My …
[This is the first in a series of short “Buswell Bites” I hope to post in time. This first “bite” comes from J. Oliver Buswell’s 1926 address to Wheaton College upon his inauguration as president there. Comments very welcome.] “In the lives of many individuals, the process of maturing in Christian thinking ceases when the …
The impact of Bible Presbyterianism as a movement is greater than one might consider at first impression. While the Bible Presbyterian Church today is a but a small group of about 28 churches, there are churches in other denominations who share much of same history in their early years. These churches are principally those which …
John Witherspoon and the Connecting of American Presbyterians Speech given at the 84th General Synod of the Bible Presbyterian Church meeting in Cape Canaveral, Florida, August 9, 2021. by Rev. Douglas J. Douma [Introductory Remarks: On the theme of connectivity at the level of the general assembly (or synod in the case of the BPC), …
John Witherspoon and the Connecting of American Presbyterians Read More »
