The definitive work on Definite Atonement
From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, edited by David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson, is a major publication. …
David Wells says, “This is the definitive study. It is careful, comprehensive, deep, pastoral, and thoroughly persuasive.”
Michael Horton calls it “the most impressive defense of definite atonement in over a century.”
Read about it from Justin Taylor, see John Piper commending it, check out the book’s website and read an excerpt (PDF).
J. I. Packer: “I count it an honor to be asked to supply a foreword to this massive product of exact and well-informed scholarship.”
Archbishop Wabukala defends GAFCON
On Tuesday night, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Chairman of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans spoke at The Ridley Institute in South Carolina.
He spoke on “In Defense of GAFCON” with reference to The Thirty Nine Articles.
His address deserves wide distribution and is most encouraging. Archbishop Wabukala’s address begins 16 minutes into the video recording. (The address runs for about 45 minutes, followed by the question time which begins, after a break, at 1 hour 15 minutes into the recording. Also worth watching.)
Update: The text of his address is now available (PDF) on the GAFCON website as well as at The Ridley Institute.
Here’s a quote:
“I am so thankful to God that Christianity as moralism was not, on the whole, the gospel brought from England and the West to Africa and what we now call the Global South during the great missionary initiatives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the GAFCON movement coined the phrase ‘Confessing Anglicans,’ Provinces like mine which are the fruit of missionary endeavors have always been ‘confessing.’ For many of us the writings of John Stott and J.I. Packer simply were normal Anglicanism and too many of us assumed that the rest of the Communion thought the same way!
However, in the past thirty years it has become clear that the West has finally exhausted the capital of its Christian heritage. The combination of secularization and the growth of global media and communications has laid bare a fundamental theological divergence between Western secularized moralistic Anglicanism and confessional Anglicanism. The resulting strains have seriously damaged the Communion — many faithful orthodox Anglicans have been marginalized or even ejected from the formal structures of their Churches. Sexual immorality has not only been tolerated but held out to be holy and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other formal instruments of Communion are no longer able to fulfill their basic purpose of gathering the Communion. …”
New Westminister nominees list is out
The names of those nominated for the position of Bishop of New Westminster, in the Anglican Church of Canada, have now been released. Anglican Essentials Canada Blog have helpfully added links to the CVs and videos of the candidates. Lots of talk of diversity.
The Synod begins 30th November, to replace Michael Ingham, pictured, who retired in August. Bishop Ingham famously declared that J I Packer and David Short had abandoned Christian ministry.
How can Systematic Theology enrich and energise preaching?
Canon James Packer spoke recently for The Charles Simeon Trust in the US.
Classic Packer. Set aside an hour and be encouraged and strengthened in your preaching (or in encouraging others in their preaching).
On Vimeo. (h/t Justin Taylor.)
The Gentle Temeraire
“The book is a devotional gem.
It is also a reminder that perhaps the most important voices in the church are not those of the young and the beautiful, of the middle aged who cannot accept that their teenage years are behind them, least of all of the Twittocrats who can reduce any profound and subtly beautiful truth to 140 banal and clichéd characters; instead, they are the voices of the old and the weak who know whereof they speak when it comes to the cross and suffering and weakness.”
– Read all of Carl Trueman’s commendation of J I Packer’s Weakness is the Way.
The Marcions have landed!
“When one asks the most influential thinkers in the modern evangelical church are, one might find names such as Jim Packer, John Stott, and Don Carson.
I would like to suggest, however, that there is one whose influence is perhaps much greater than we are aware of, yet whose thinking all but pervades the modern evangelical church: Marcion. …”
– There’s plenty to think about in Carl Trueman’s article at Evangelicals Now.
Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves
“Expository preaching is the preaching of the man who knows Holy Scripture to be the living word of the living God, and who desires only that it should be free to speak its own message to sinful men and women; who therefore preaches from a text, and in preaching labours, as the Puritans would say, to ‘open’ it, or, in Simeon’s phrase, to ‘bring out of the text what is there’…”
– More than fifty years ago, J I Packer wrote this article on Simeon and preaching – for Churchman. You can now read it here online (PDF file).
Why Catechesis now?
“The church in Western culture today is experiencing a crisis of holiness. To be holy is to be ‘set apart,’ different, living life according to God’s Word and story, not according to the stories that the world tells us are the meaning of life.
The more the culture around us becomes post- and anti-Christian the more we discover church members in our midst, sitting under sound preaching, yet nonetheless holding half-pagan views of God, truth, and human nature, and in their daily lives using sex, money, and power in very worldly ways. …”
– Tim Keller lays out the need for a new Catechism to be launched next week by The Gospel Coalition.
Related: Grounded in the Gospel – J I Packer on The White Horse Inn.
Sydney Anglicans VII: The value of theological education
Mark Thompson writes part seven of his series on Sydney Anglicans –
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that you will not understand the Diocese of Sydney unless you’ve understood its theological college…”
Read it all here –
Without a doubt the single most important resource God has given to the diocese of Sydney is Moore Theological College. Opening in 1856, thanks to a marvellously generous bequest by Thomas Moore, an early settler in Sydney, it has provided theological education for the vast bulk of Sydney’s clergy over the last one hundred and fifty-six years. Read more
Walking in opposite directions
From St. George’s Tron in Glasgow:
“Download Walking Away from Jesus by Willie Philip and Walking with Jesus by Dr J.I. Packer.
Over a year ago, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took the decisive step of walking away from the historic, orthodox Gospel. These reflections on that decision were written by Dr Philip for the Tron Times of May 2011.
By re-publishing them now, alongside the article by Dr Packer, we see clearly that the situation faced by our church family in recent days is shared by many in the world-wide confessing church today. There is great encouragement to know we don’t stand alone.”
– Download here. (PDF)
‘Knowing God’ — free AudioBook for January
This month’s free audiobook from Christian Audio is J I Packer’s Knowing God.
The m4b version is about 300MB. It’s a new recording, read by Simon Vance. Know someone who doesn’t read books? Send them the link.
His demands are not burdensome
A Christmas reflection from Peter Brain, Bishop of Armidale:
‘He was born outside a small hotel in an obscure Jewish village in the great days of the Roman Empire. The story is usually prettified when we tell it Christmas by Christmas, but it is really rather beastly and cruel. The reason why Jesus was born outside the hotel is that it was full and nobody would offer a bed to a woman in labour, so that she had to have her baby in the stables, and cradle him in a cattle-trough. The story is told dispassionately and without comment, but no thoughtful reader can help shuddering at the picture of callousness and degradation that it draws.’ So wrote J I Packer in his classic Knowing God (1973).
Christmas reminds us of our sin, of that there is no doubt. We needed saving and continue to do so. The fact that we seek to beautify these ugly facts of the Christmas event, and continue to trivialise their importance with a range of activities that leave us too exhausted to reflect and rendered unable to grasp its seriousness by our round of trivial festivities, demonstrates our propensity to crowd God out. Read more
Photos from St. John’s Vancouver
St. John’s Vancouver has posted on their website a photo gallery – showing their last service at St. John’s Shaughnessy on September 18, and the first Sunday service at their new location, on September 25.
St. John’s Vancouver leaves the building, praying for God’s blessing on New Westminster
The latest from from St. John’s Vancouver is a reminder to keep our friends in Vancouver in your prayers –
“countercultural and counterintuitive”
1.) Media Release, and further below, David Short’s message for the Parish Life News for September 18 2011.
VANCOUVER, BC – September 22, 2011 – St. John’s Vancouver Anglican Church, the largest Anglican congregation in Canada, will begin Sunday services at a new location after moving from its historic location on Granville Street and Nanton Avenue. The congregation, through a lengthy legal action, chose to leave their buildings rather than compromise their beliefs.
St. John’s Vancouver, which had been meeting at the Granville Street location for almost 100 years, will begin Sunday services on September 25 at Oakridge Adventist Church, at West 37th Avenue and Baillie Street in Vancouver. Read more
Largest Anglican Church congregation in Canada leaves historic church home
Sunday 18th September will be the last Sunday for St. John’s Vancouver (formerly St. John’s Shaughnessy) at the place where they have been meeting for 100 years.
This would be an especially good time to continue in prayer for the congregation, the ministry team led by David Short, and for their expanded, gracious, proclamation of the Lord Jesus in the city of Vancouver.
They’ve just published this news release: Read more
What we believe
The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple…