Topic Archives: Theology

Someone has said, Imagine you had never driven a car before. In your village all you have are horses and carts. A car appears one night in a field. No one quite knows what to make of it. Eventually, seeing it has wheels, people decide that it must be a vehicle of some sort. So […]

In the extraordinary opening ceremony to mark the opening of the Olympic Games one of the climaxes of the evening was to see that one word that hung suspended from the giant arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The word was ‘ETERNITY’. It had also been hanging there on January 1 to greet the dawning […]

Chris Harmse of South Africa is a hammer thrower. He holds the record on the African continent for that event. A big man in every way he had qualified for the South African team during a pre-Olympic event in Croatia on July 15. Then he discovered that the final of the hammer throw took place […]

A Quiet Revolution; a Chronicle of Beginnings of Reformation in the Southern Baptist Convention by Ernest C. Reisinger and D. Matthew Allen, pb., n.p., Published by the Founders Press, editor@founders.org and distributed by Christian Gospel Book Service, 107 pp. This book, written in part by the oldest of the Banner of Truth trustees, Ernest C. Reisinger, […]

In the Banner of Truth magazine, December 1971, the late S. M. Houghton wrote about the Passion Play at Oberammergau: In recent days Protestantism has suffered invasion from the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, noted for the Passion Play which it presents to the world once in a decade, a thank-offering, as it terms it, for […]

The heart of the reformed faith–the heart of biblical Christianity–is God-centredness: the conviction that God himself is supremely important. We define all our doctrine in a God-centred way. Sin is horrible because it is an affront to God. Salvation is wonderful because it brings glory to God. Heaven is heaven because it is the place […]

The annual Aberystwyth Conference of the Evangelical Movement of Wales takes place during the second full week of August. The preceding week is the National Eisteddfod of Wales and the succeeding week is the annual EMW Welsh language Conference which a few hundred people attend. The significance of these weeks, carefully laid out in August, […]

For part of Monday, I missed two of the sessions of the SBC pastors’ conference, attending instead one sponsored by the Center for Church Reform, a ministry developed by Mark Dever’s church in Washington, DC. Dr. Roger Nicole was the main speaker, dealing with the extent of the atonement. There were also two Q&A sessions […]

I just returned from a Reformed pastors conference here in Spain. It was refreshing to take four days out of the usual routine to meet with other workers, pastors,  and missionaries of like convictions. I preached the opening message at the conference, on Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:10-22. The two main speakers were a Reformed […]

Billy Morrison spoke in our church in Aberystwyth on June 20th. I had not seen him for six or seven years when I visited the prison in Northern Ireland where he was serving twelve years for terrorist offences. His father had been a member of the loyalist para-militaries and so he was raised to consider […]

Two years ago a representative of the Slav Lands Christian Fellowship was invited to western Siberia to see the fruit of an indigenous missionary outreach that had begun seven years before in this previously unevangelised field. He went not as a tourist but to assess the possibilities of co-operating in a practical ways with our […]

Session 1 The Conference commenced with the 300 men singing the metrical version of Psalm 65, and with prayer. Iain Murray then explained to the Conference that the sickness of Dr Robert Godfrey of Westminster Seminary, California, had prevented his attendance, and that Dr Sinclair Ferguson would speak instead of him. John Marshall opened a […]

Perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached in America was the one Jonathan Edwards delivered entitled Sinners in the hands of an Angry God. Not only has the sermon been reproduced in countless catalogues of preaching but it is included in most anthologies of early American literature. So scandalous is this vivid portrayal of unconverted […]

Near the end of his life, Augustine of Hippo meticulously reviewed everything he had ever published. He wrote an entire catalogue of his own works, a painstakingly annotated bibliography with hundreds of revisions and amendments to correct flaws he saw in his own earlier material. The book, titled Retractationes, is powerful evidence of Augustine’s humility […]

To some it might seem unnecessary and even wickedly controversial to thrust upon readers any discussion of Arminianism. This might appear to be the case for two reasons. First of all, why should we revive ancient controversies and thereby provoke animosities that have long since died the death of old age? Arminianism takes its name […]