"Is not the public interest of Christ and his cause infinitely more important than any interest of your own, and should you not prefer his glory and the welfare of his kingdom before everything else? Should any temporary suffering, or any sacrifice which you can be called to make, be suffered to come into competition with the honour of his name?" (John Flavel, Keeping The Heart [Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2019], 101 ..read more

The documents are written in different genres and at different lengths (the shortness of some of Paul's letters), among other differences. We shouldn't expect Paul to say much about the contents of the gospels and Acts. But he does say more than people typically suggest. In addition to the more obvious references - the timing of Jesus' life, his crucifixion, the Last Supper, his being betrayed, his having multiple brothers, that one of the brothers was named James, the names of some of Jesus' disciples, etc. - there are many less obvious corroborations. I want to link some examples I've discu ..read more

"But if sin in the retrospect be the sting of death, what must sin in the prospect be? My friends, we do not often enough look at what sin is to be. We see what it is; first the seed, then the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. It is the wish, the imagination, the desire, the sight, the taste, the deed; but what is sin in its next development? We have observed sin as it grows; we have seen it, at first, a very little thing, but expanding itself until it has swelled into a mountain. We have seen it like 'a little cloud, the size of a man's hand,' but we have beheld it gathe ..read more

I wrote a post about the subject in 2007. Below are links to my recent series on the topic. I expect to add further links to this page in the future, as I write more material that's relevant. Part 1: Preliminaries, Some Earlier Sources Part 2: Augustine And His Opponents Part 3: The Mercyists Part 4: Some Other Sources ..read more

Jerome wrote, regarding Jovinian, a monk who was a contemporary: "He endeavours to show that 'they who with full assurance of faith have been born again in baptism, cannot be overthrown by the devil.'…The second proposition of Jovinianus is that the baptized cannot be tempted by the devil. And to escape the imputation of folly in saying this, he adds: 'But if any are tempted, it only shows that they were baptized with water, not with the Spirit, as we read was the case with Simon Magus.'…Does any one think that we are safe, and that it is right to fall asleep when once we have been baptized ..read more

In his translation of Augustine's work cited in my last post, Gregory Lombardo wrote the following about some of the individuals Augustine was responding to: "Augustine, however, does not mention any names, and there is no evidence either here or in any other place that he is referring to these passages from the works of Jerome. Nevertheless, both Jerome and Ambrose seemed to have shared in the not uncommon error of their time, namely, that all Christians would sooner or later be reunited to God, an error which Augustine refutes here and in a number of other places." (St. Augustine: On Faith ..read more

My last post mentioned that Augustine wrote against some advocates of eternal security in his day. See, for example, section 21:17-27 in The City Of God. He describes a few different forms of eternal security that existed in his day, involving anything from no discipline or punishment in the afterlife to a large amount of it, though all of the individuals in question would eventually go to heaven: "he shall either quite escape condemnation, or shall be liberated from his doom after some time shorter or longer" (21:22). It should be noted that Augustine opens his comments about these individual ..read more

It seems that one of the consequences of the societal changes I referred to in my last post is that some aspects of the culture are taking on more of a tabloid nature. For a long time, there's been a noticeable decline on conservative political radio programs, on conservative political web sites, and in other parts of our culture that have usually been thought of as traditional to some extent. You can see differences in a lot of contexts. There's more of a personal nature to things, such as a tendency to get overly emotional about certain individuals and to be overly focused on topics that are ..read more

Because of factors like advances in technology, the increase of political freedoms, and the effects of capitalism on the world, people have more access to more information (through television, smartphones, and so on). The large majority of people don't want to make the changes needed to sort through that information responsibly (such as decreasing their time spent on less significant things and increasing their time spent on more significant things). They look for shortcuts. They become more dependent on emotions, intuitions, and such to sort through issues. They look more than they should for ..read more

Mark 3:17 tells us that Jesus referred to the sons of Zebedee as Sons of Thunder. To my knowledge, thunder is referred to several times in the New Testament, and the only references outside Mark 3:17 are found in the writings attributed to John the son of Zebedee (John 12:29, Revelation 4:5, 6:1, 8:5, 10:3-4, 11:19, 14:2, 16:18, 19:6). And many of those references could easily have been avoided. John is describing multiple details about something, and the thunder aspect could easily have been left out. He's describing what something sounded like, and he could easily have compared it to somethi ..read more