To have a proper confidence in salvation, believers don’t need to muster up greater and great conviction. Instead, we need deeper insight into what salvation is. When we understand our salvation thoroughly enough, conviction and assurance take care of themselves. An adequate doctrine of salvation

Read Part One here. You can’t get assurance of salvation just by insisting ever more loudly that you are assured, or that the church or the Bible or God’s promise or God’s character assure you. All those appeals to authorities as objective grounds of assurance

The doctrine of assurance can be slippery. Even among those Protestant evangelical traditions that have recognized the necessity of formulating a doctrine of assurance that answers to the biblical witness about faith’s confidence, there has long been a candid acknowledgement that the doctrine must simultaneously

A dialogue overheard between two school children, earlier this year. It is slightly abbreviated, especially around the singing part, but otherwise verbatim. Only one of the children is mine. Girl: You are made of dust. Boy: No I’m not. Girl: You don’t believe the Bible!

“I can write in letters which make even the blind see,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the influential German philosopher who interpreted modern life as the murder of God. Nietzsche worried that the very people who had spent the nineteenth century driving God out of their

A couple of weeks ago I preached at my home church, Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada. We had just completed a months-long series that had taken us through the whole book of Romans, and were finishing up with a few sermons on big

In chapter 3 of his helpful 1996 book Truth & Power: The Place of Scripture in the Christian Life, J. I. Packer takes a few paragraphs to evaluate the effect of Karl Barth’s theology on biblical interpretation in the twentieth century. “Barth’s work over half