Christian Living / Controversies in the Church

  • Beauty & the Gospel by Terry Yount

    FROM TABLETALK | July 2010

    In the modern era, beauty is unavoidably tied to the simplistic concept of “prettiness,” like that found in greeting card poems or velvet paintings of lighthouses. In truth, beauty is far more. Beauty reveals the gamut of human experience. True …Read More

  • Many Gifts, One Body by Burk Parsons

    FROM TABLETALK | May 2005

    A few years ago I was given a month-long sabbatical to study in Wittenberg, Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation. While in Wittenberg, I stayed at the Evangelical Preacher’s Seminary, which shared the same courtyard as Martin Luther …Read More

  • The Service of Leading by Burk Parsons

    FROM TABLETALK | May 2005

    Good music is hard to find these days. In fact, I would argue, most of what we hear today isn’t music at all, it’s just synthesized noise with a beat. Good music, however, takes time to produce. It …Read More

  • Covenant Community by David McKay

    FROM TABLETALK | October 2006

    When a pastor looks at his assembled congregation, what does he see? If he accepts a biblical covenant theology, he knows that he is not looking at a collection of randomly gathered individuals, or even families, but at a part …Read More

  • Our Covenant God by Burk Parsons

    FROM TABLETALK | October 2006

    From time to time we receive a letter from a reader who would like us to use words that are more familiar. And although we generally try to define theological and biblical terms that may be unfamiliar to our readers …Read More

  • Reflecting the Art of God by Michael Card

    FROM TABLETALK | September 2006

    We will never in this world, nor perhaps in the next, fully appreciate the cataclysm that was the coming of Jesus Christ. John speaks of His redefining all the fundamental categories of religion (16:8ff.). But every corner of the …Read More

  • A New Paul? by Gene Edward Veith

    FROM TABLETALK | July 2006

    Liberals have been attempting to separate Paul from Jesus at least from the time of the nineteenth-century agnostic Matthew Arnold to today’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. “Paul is the true founder of Christianity,” they say, not seeing …Read More

  • The Author of All Beauty by John Duncan

    FROM TABLETALK | March 2006

    Why do Christians need to be “recovering the beauty of the arts,” as R.C. explores in his series by the same name? Because beauty, like truth, belongs to the children of God, and we have lost our grasp of …Read More

  • On Controversy by Keith Mathison

    FROM TABLETALK | February 2010

    John Newton is best known as the writer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”. Were that all he bequeathed to the church, it would be an incredible legacy. There is another small work by Newton, however, that I believe could be …Read More

  • Sons, Not Slaves by Tom Ascol

    FROM TABLETALK | March 2009

    Have you ever stopped to consider that Christians who live after the coming of Christ are in a more privileged position than Jews who lived before the coming of Christ and even those believers who lived during His first advent …Read More

  • Has Science Buried God? by Keith Mathison

    FROM TABLETALK | April 2009

    One of the most common ways of looking at the relationship between science and faith is the conflict thesis, which posits an inherent conflict between science and religion. The conflict thesis was popularized in the nineteenth century by John William …Read More

  • The Authority of the State by Cal Thomas

    FROM TABLETALK | March 2009

    The late philosopher-theologian Francis Schaeffer taught me to always begin a discussion with a definition. The reason, he said, is that different people define the same word in different ways. Dictionary.com defines authority as “the power to determine, adjudicate …Read More

  • Through Many Toils by Burk Parsons

    FROM TABLETALK | May 2012

    John Newton (1725–1807) is perhaps best known for his hymn “Amazing Grace,” but what many do not know is that Newton was also a faithful churchman who served as a pastor in England from 1764 until a month before …Read More

  • The Rest of the Story by R.C. Sproul Jr.

    FROM TABLETALK | June 2011

    Obedience is a rather narrow road. Disobedience, on the other hand, has a great, sweeping plain of options. Because we are like the Pharisees, we find it easy to convert the law of God into sundry sins of omission. We …Read More

  • Evangelism and the Gospel by Donald Whitney

    FROM TABLETALK | May 2011

    It does little good to encourage people to discipline themselves to evangelize if they do not know the gospel. Try this experiment in your church, class, or small group to reveal one’s level of preparedness to share the gospel …Read More