All Articles For Hanko, Herman

It has come as a surprise to me that the current controversy in our churches has been over the question of the place of good works in God’s work of salvation. Most of us were taught the truth of this question in our covenant homes, our catechism classes, the preaching we heard every Lord’s Day and it is, as far as I am concerned, what I was taught in the Seminary. It was part of our heritage with its glorious emphasis on sovereign grace. That we face controversy over the question is puzzling to me. Let me briefly spell out...

ECUMENISM AND MERGERS The time of Synods and Church Assemblies is once again almost past. While a host of decisions on a variety of subjects were taken, ecumenism dominated the discussions of the broadest assemblies of the nation’s churches. A survey of what happened includes the following.

This report of our Synod held this year in the Hope Protestant Reformed Church will have to be somewhat general and incomplete. It will have to be incomplete because the Synod is still in session at the time this article is being written. It will have to be general be­cause it is not the intention of this survey to inform our people in detail of all the decisions taken.

Candidate Kuiper, beloved brethren and sisters in the Lord, fathers of Synod: I desire to speak to you tonight on the subject of the importance of the preaching of the gospel.

In our discussion of singing in congregational worship, we have yet to discuss the doxologies which are a common part of the worship service. 

Dear Timothy, The emotions of man have always been hard to understand. This is not because we are not familiar with them for we experience our own emotions every moment of our life. But (and this is true of all those things which are most familiar to us), although we know them so well from personal experience, when we try to describe what they are and understand them somewhat, then we run into all kinds of trouble. 

I recall vividly the time, at a rather informal faculty meeting, when Prof. Hoeksema and I talked a bit about the possibility of publishing a Seminary Journal. The time was about fourteen years ago, and we hesitated long before entering this new field. We wanted to publish a Journal which would be somewhat more “scientific” in character than the Standard Bearer; i.e., which would deal more, technically with matters of theology than would a paper with greater popular appeal.

February 1, 1980 Dear Timothy,  We were talking about the power with which we are endowed by God to know ourselves. You will recall that we ended our last letter with a discussion of the apparent conflict between the Scriptural injunction on the one hand to live lives of self forgetfulness, and on the other to be constantly busy with knowing ourselves in some sense — as in self-examination. 

How is reform brought about? 

Introduction  It is to be hoped that this subject will be, first of all, of benefit to our graduates. I refer to the general decline in preaching in our day. I refer not so much to the fact that there is a drift away from the preaching as the center of worship services. I refer rather to a radical change in the content and the form of preaching. The two are related to each other. And it is my intention to defend expository preaching. This defense requires a stress upon exegesis as being at the bottom of all sound preaching.