All Articles For Kuiper, Douglas J

The First Ecumenical Council, that of Nicea, met in 325. Fifty-six years later (381), the second one met in Constantinople. Fifty years later (431), the third Council met in Ephesus. But only twenty years elapsed between the third Council and the fourth, which convened in 451 in Chalcedon. Perhaps twenty years between councils seems like a long time; after all, we are used to annual synods. But remember that provincial and regional councils met more often. Between ecumenical councils, which addressed matters of highest importance that pertained to Christendom, twenty years was relatively short. What went on in those twenty...

We saw that the error of Nestorianism made necessary the calling of the Council of Ephesus (cf. July 2021, SB, p. 420). Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, taught that Christ had two natures because He had two persons, which two persons were joined in His incarnation. Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, opposed Nestorius, and Emperor Theodosius II deposed him. But division regarding the matter made the emperor realize the need for an ecumenical council to settle it. A messy meeting The Council began in May 431 with about two hundred bishops attending. Even the Bishop of Rome (later known as...

Several factors made it prudent for Emperor Charles V  to call the Diet of Worms. Two of them were Rome’s  attempt to quiet Martin Luther and Luther’s response  to these attempts. Background  On October 31, 1517, ten days shy of his thirty-fourth  birthday, a monk named Martin Luther nailed his  Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. In  them Luther questioned Rome’s view of penance—that  one’s sins were forgiven when one verbally confessed  one’s sins to a priest, carried out the prescribed works  that supposedly showed sorrow for sin, and heard the  priest declare one to be forgiven. Even...

A Beginner’s Guide to New Testament Studies: Understanding Key Debates, by Nijay K. Gupta. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020. Pp. 196. $24.99 (softcover). ISBN: 978-0810097575. [Reviewed by Douglas J. Kuiper] Nijay Gupta, professor of New Testament at Portland Seminary, presents a beginner’s guide to New Testament studies. Emphatically, this is a beginner’s guide: “This textbook aims to aid the uninitiated in understanding, in a simple way, some of the most important and hotly debated issues in academic study of the New Testament” (xi). And: “It is written for relative newcomers to the world of New Testament studies, not experts”...

Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, by Bruce Gordon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp xvii + 349. $32.50 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0300235975. [Reviewed by Douglas J. Kuiper] Biographies of Martin Luther and John Calvin abound. Of the reformer Huldrych (Ulrich) Zwingli (1484-1531) they do not. Another English biography of Zwingli is always welcome. Besides, Zwingli’s significance cannot be overstated. Although he began to understand the true gospel about the same time as Luther, Zwingli did so com­pletely independent of Luther. And in some respects he went further than Luther: “Nothing in Luther’s reforms matched the zeal with which the worship...

Previous article in this series: February 1, 2021, p. 205. In our last article we noted that the elders must oversee the election and installation of officebearers, and the work of officebearers. Doing that, they oversee the various offices in the church. Now we see that their oversight is even more specific: it extends to the doctrine and life of every officebearer personally.   Overseeing their doctrine and life The elders are to oversee both the doctrine and the life of the church’s officebearers—that is, they oversee each officebearer personally. The Form of Ordination of Elders and Deacons requires this...

The First Ecumenical Council (Nicea, AD 325) established the doctrine that Jesus Christ is truly God, being of the same essence as the Father. The Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, AD 381) reiterated the deity of Christ, began to work through the relationship between Christ’s person and natures, and set forth clearly the deity of the Holy Spirit. In the fifty years before the next ecumenical council met, theologians continued to investigate the relation between Christ’s divine person and His two natures. What particularly made necessary the meeting of the Council of Ephesus in AD 431 was the error of Nestorianism....

What is the nature of true preaching? For now, the question is not, What is the content of true preaching? The content of true preaching is the gospel. That man has not truly preached who has not set forth the gospel. The following article will develop that point more fully. The question now is, What is the nature of the preaching of the gospel? The question is relevant. For one thing, every week God’s people sit under the preaching of the gospel. What is it under which we sit? And why do we do sit under it? Second, the question...

In October 2021 the faculty of the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary presented a conference on the doctrine of preaching. That the conference treated the doctrine of preaching means that it did not touch on matters of style and delivery, but rather on the nature and content of the preaching, as set forth in Scripture and the Reformed confessions. The four main articles in this issue of the Protestant Reformed Theological Journal contain the written version of those speeches. The first article underscores that the preaching of the gospel, by one who is properly called to that work, is the voice...

Previous article in this series: March 1, 2021, p. 250. The Second Ecumenical Council settled the controversy regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. It also made decisions regarding church government. Two such decisions we noted in our last article: it required bishops to labor within their own geographic jurisdictions; and it stated that the Bishop of Constantinople receives honor after the Bishop of Rome. We conclude our treatment of this Council by noting some of its other decisions, or “canons.”   Maximus never was a bishop A certain Maximus considered himself to be a bishop, and ordained other men to...