Category Archives: People

What Evangelical Religion is not

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Having set out what he regards as the five leading features of ‘evangelical religion’ (i.e. evangelical faith), J.C. Ryle then goes on to write about what it is not:-

1.  It does not despise learning, although it steadily refuses to place any uninspired writings on a level with revelation.

2.  It does not undervalue the Church, although it refuses to exalt the Church above Christ, or teach people that membership of the Church is identical with membership of Christ.…

Evangelical Religion

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JC. Ryle (1817-1900) was a doughty supporter and proponent of ‘evangelical religion’ (i.e. evangelical faith).

In his celebrated work, Knots Untied, Ryle set out what he regarded as the leading features of such faith:-

“These I consider to be five in number.

a) The first leading feature of Evangelical Religion is the absolute supremacy it assigns to Holy Scripture, as the only rule of faith and practice … Show us anything plainly written in that Book, and, however trying to flesh and blood, we will receive it, believe it, and submit to it.…

‘And to die is gain’

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Paul’s desire was ‘to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far’ (Phil 1:23).

That sparkling Puritan, Thomas Watson, writes:-

To a believer death is great gain. A saint can count what his losses for Christ are here—but he cannot count how great his gains are at death…Death to a believer is the daybreak of eternal brightness. To show fully what a believer’s gains are at death, would be a task too great for an angel; all hyperboles fall short of it; the reward of glory exceeds our imagination.…

Ryle and Ritualism

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Throughout his long ministry, J.C. Ryle (1817-1900) had to defend evangelical (that is to say, gospel) truth on a number of fronts.  One of these concerned the threat posed by the Ritualism of the Anglo-Catholic movement.

Ian Farley reports that in 1877 Ryle identified five key teachings of the Ritualists:

  1. They seek to turn the Communion Table into an ‘Altar’ and the Lord’s Supper into a ‘Sacrifice’ and encourage the idea of a real material presence of Christ’s body and blood, under the forms of the consecrated bread and wine.
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Dances with the Trinity?

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Important to Richard Rohr – important enough to use it as the title of a book – is the idea of the Holy Trinity as a dance.

Rohr explains:-

‘At the heart of Christian revelation, God is not seen as a distant, static monarch but— as we will explore together— a divine circle dance, as the early Fathers of the church dared to call it (in Greek perichoresis, the origin of our word choreography). God is the Holy One presenced in the dynamic and loving action of Three.’

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The ‘cosmic Christ’ and the ‘historical Jesus’

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Over the years, a number of attempts have been made to put some kind of wedge between ‘Christ’ and ‘Jesus’.  Some, for example, have distinguished between ‘the Jesus of history’ and ‘the Christ of faith’.  Philip Pullman, in similar vein, would have us imagine ‘Jesus’ as a ‘good man’ and ‘Christ’ as a ‘scoundrel’.

A couple of months ago, I read Richard Rohr’s book The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016).

I had been prompted to read it by a friend, who had felt reassured by Rohr’s challenge to evangelicalism’s ‘exclusivism’ and thought that this book offered a new and better way.…

John 14:6 – “No one comes to the Father except through me”

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“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, NIV).

These words constitute the go-to text for Christians who wish to assert that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.  It is also the go-to text for those who feel that Christianity condemns itself as abhorrent and intolerant by reason of the very exclusiveness of this saying.

But does does the text actually mean what most of its friends (and, indeed, most of its enemies) think it means?…

Packer on eternal punishment

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In 1990, aware that respected evangelicals such as John Stott, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes and John Wenham had recently lent their support to annihilationism/conditionalism, J.I. Packer gave a lecture on ‘The Problem of Eternal Punishment.’

Packer began by affirming what all evangelicals should affirm, namely that our views about ultimate destiny should be shaped not by what what we might like to be so, but by what Scripture actually says is so.  Packer also observed what many before and after him have observed: that the Scriptural voice which speaks most frequently and firmly about hell is that of Jesus himself.…

The logic of the Virgin Birth

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‘The Virgin Birth meshes harmoniously with the rest of the New Testament message about Jesus. He himself worked miracles and rose miraculously from the dead, so no new problem is involved in affirming that he entered the world miraculously. He left the world supernaturally, by resurrection and ascension, so a supernatural way of arriving was entirely fitting. The stress laid on Jesus’ preincarnate dignity and glory (Jn 1:1-9; 17:5; 2 Cor 8:9; Php 2:5-11; Col 1:15-17; Heb 1:1-3; 1 Jn 1:1) made a mode of entry into incarnate life that involved proclamation of the glorious role he was coming to fulfill (Mt 1:21-23; Lk 1:31-35) more natural than any alternative.…

The justice of final judgement

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‘The justice of God’s final judgment, which Jesus will administer, according to the Gospel, lies in two things: first, the fact that what people receive is not only what they deserve but that they have in effect already chosen — namely, to be forever without God and therefore without any of the good that He gives; second, the fact that the sentence is proportioned to the knowledge of God’s Word, work and will that was actually disregarded (cf. …