Swindoll is still doing a great job in his preaching series on Romans. Though dispensationalist and known for some cheesy work in the 80s and 90s, Swindoll’s teaching has definitely improved since his (unofficial) conversion to Reformed soteriology a number of years ago; he has always said his biggest influence was Spurgeon. I also finished [...]

Dispensationalism was essentially founded by John Nelson Darby in the 1840s. Darby claims that God hid the special insights of his theology from Christians for over 1,700 years, and then revealed it only to him during his lifetime.[1] The preaching of D.L. Moody and the Scofield Reference Bible popularized Dispensationalism in America. Eventually, in the [...]

Today, Neo-Calvinists seem to be infatuated with combining Darwinism/common descent with Christianity. The problem, of course, is that the founders of Neo-Calvinism – Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper, perhaps the two greatest systematic theologians since John Calvin – abhorred the idea of theistic evolution and the idea that human beings descended from animals. Herman Bavinck, [...]

“As a loving God, God wants as many people as possible to be freely saved and as few as possible to be lost. His goal, then, is to achieve an optimal balance between these, to create no more of the lost than are necessary to attain a certain number of the saved. It is possible [...]

Abraham Kuyper and his successor Herman Bavinck are usually considered the “fathers of Neo-Calvinism.” I will spare you the details of what Neo-Calvinism is since more competent folks have already done so. But, I consider myself a Neo-Calvinist simply because I love the works of and adhere to the great majority of Kuyper and Bavinck’s [...]

A friend of mine just recently received a copy of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith with exposition. My first thought was, “What 19 year old girl these days goes and buys the 1689 LBCF for ‘fun’?…That’s awesome! (perhaps there is hope for my generation!)” and my second thought was, “why haven’t I done that?” [...]

Systematic theology is a systematic, logical, and topical approach to organizing our knowledge about God and His works in creation. As such, there’s no such thing as doing apologetics before doing systematics since apologists defend not just a few facts, but the Christian worldview – the gospel – as a whole system. Thus, all apologists [...]