Central Baptist Theological Seminary

God has created humans to exercise dominion over the created order. Exercising dominion includes the ability to invent devices that allow us to bend the natural world to our use, sometimes in wonderful ways. Such machines and their products reflect the image of God in us. We often build them not merely to be useful, but also to be beautiful. Not surprisingly, people become in...

A friend recently forwarded a copy of A. T. Pierson’s little history of the Keswick Movement. I had read this work some years ago when I was more favorably disposed toward Keswick influences than I am now. But at my friend’s urging, I read it again. In particular, he asked that I pay attention to what Pierson (and Keswick) had to say about “matters of doubt.”

When I he...

This past week, Central Seminary was privileged to host the annual Bible Faculty Summit. This meeting has been going on for about thirty years now. It grew out of a collaboration between David Doran and Bob Jones III. Both men led institutions of higher learning, and both wanted to provide ways for their professors of Bible and theology to sharpen one another.

In those...

[This essay was originally published on February 5, 2016.]

The Reformers erected the doctrine of calling in reaction to the Romanist distinction between clergy and laity. At the time, Catholics recognized only two vocations: the calling to consecration (which typically involved joining an order) and the calling to ordination (priesthood). In other words, monks...

Certain terms that get thrown around in theological conversation sometimes perplex novices. In fact, they sometimes perplex more advanced students, too. One reason is that these terms can be used in multiple senses. A word may have a more general meaning but also a more technical one. And sometimes terms get misused. Consequently, I am offering a quick tutorial summarizing de...