As an example
A confessing community: Salvation applied
Redemption is something that has been achieved through the historic life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That does not mean that it is an academic, intellectual reality. Instead, redemption is something that must be applied to God’s chosen people in space-time history. Confession…
A confessing community: Salvation purchased
Confession 4.5 brings us to the doctrine of justification proper, which is the central question of religion: How can I be right with (or, just before) God? We will only appreciate the magnitude of justification when we ask the right questions: Is God majestic…
A confessing community: Salvation promised
The church’s Christology (its doctrine of Jesus Christ) was solidified through centuries of discussion, dominating the attention of the Christian church for at least the first eight hundred years of new covenant history. This is understandable, because the nature of Christ is one of…
A confessing community: Salvation secured
In November 1785, Scottish poet Robert Burns was ploughing his field when he accidentally destroyed a mouse’s nest, which it needed to survive the winter. Burns’s brother claims that the poet was still holding onto the plough when he composed one of his most…
A confessing community: Salvation appointed
In a recent online conversation about Christian universalism, one commenter opined: “My problem with Christian universalism is the same exact problem I have with Calvinism. It’s God forcing us to love him.” The comment reveals a grave misunderstanding of the biblical doctrines of grace….
A confessing community: Salvation revealed
The Bible is a collection of inspired writings, spanning an array of genres, written by forty-plus authors over a span of some four thousand years. Yet it presents a single, united message. It is easy to miss this central theme in the complexity of…
A confessing community: Salvation provided
Sola 5, whose Confession we are studying in this series, is an association of God-centred evangelical churches in Southern Africa. While there is a degree of doctrinal diversity between the churches, all churches confess certain core doctrines. Most core to the identity of the…
A confessing community: Sin
The five solas of the Protestant Reformation remind us of the gospel truth that the Reformers recaptured: that salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide) in Christ alone (solus Christus) according to Scripture alone (sola scriptura) for the glory…
A confessing community: The fall
It is universally recognised that “nobody’s perfect.” Bad things happen to good people. Innocent people—including infants—die. Every culture in history has had to wrestle with why. What is the source of imperfection, death, and misery in the human race? From a humanistic standpoint, it…
A confessing community: Creation of angels
Writing in 1941, German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann suggested that the Bible is filled with “mythological thought,” which can be traced to “Jewish apocalypticism” and “the Gnostic myth of redemption.” Bultmann suggested that such mythological thought “is incredible to men and women today because…