The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: A Review
When people think of Thomas Helwys, they often think of religious liberty, and rightfully so. Yet Helwys’s writings address far more than religious liberty. Marvin Jones seeks to demonstrate this in his recent monograph The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: The Foundational Contributions of Thomas Helwys.[1] Jones contends that while many scholars have considered Helwys’s Mystery of Iniquity to be a work focused primarily on...
Recommended Books (Winter 2018)
The cold grey days of winter are here again. This year has been particularly frigid, driving even the hardiest indoors for unusually long spells. In such weather, there are few pass times more profitable than spending the day in a reading chair with a good book. Below we have provided some of our favorite reads from recent weeks that may be beneficial to you as we slog through the last half of the season. Be sure to leave us some of...
Recommended Books (Summer 2017)
Reading is a sacred act of creation and memory. Our ability to use words to call worlds historic and fantastical into existence is a part of God’s image in us. When we write, we create new worlds on the page that are fully realized only when our words are incarnated in the mind of a reader. Sometimes those worlds are florid products of our imaginations that are only tangentially tethered to the real world. These creations recall and...
Are You Ministering to Humans?
In the 1982 blockbuster Blade Runner, (or its literary precursor Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is assigned to track down bio-engineered replicates and “retire” them—that is, kill them. Of course, the duplicates and humans look and sound exactly the same. The only way to distinguish between a human person and a facsimile is to use a test, the Voight-Kampff, which focuses on their...
The Church in Light of the Trinity
What is the church? Is it a building? Is it a bride? Is it a body? Evidently it’s all of the above. Scripture gives us a myriad of pictures for how we might understand the gathering of believers (Eph. 2:21; 5:22-33, 1 Cor. 15:20-23).[1] Each picture offers a different perspective. But none of them describe the Church in her entirety. Throughout history, the church has been understood largely by her marks and/or attributes. According...
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