All Articles For Stewart, Angus

February 20, 2020 Dear saints in the Protestant Reformed Churches, Due to the pressure of work—mostly good, benefi­cial, and rewarding work—it is now six months since my last letter. The bimonthly epistle is now biannual! Congregational news The new church season began in early September with ten catechumens, eight boys and two girls, in three classes: Old Testament Juniors, New Testament Seniors, and Essentials of Reformed Doctrine. The covenant children are doing well. “Saving Faith: A Biblical and Theological Analysis” is the current subject of our Tuesday morning meet­ings. So far we have treated the significance, necessity, source, subject, object,...

Theme and day trips Previous British Reformed Fellowship (BRF) family conferences have had some wonderful themes, but “Union with Christ,” the subject in July 2020 in Northern Ireland, is perhaps the most appealing. The New Testament is replete with references to our being “in Christ” and His being “in” us. Explicitly combining both concepts, 1 John 4:13 states: “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.” Union with Christ in Reformed theology, according to Heinrich Heppe, is “a real, wholesale, spiritual and indissoluble union of the person of...

Previous article in this series: January 1, 2019, p. 165 Translators In addition to those already referred to, let me tell you a little about some of our other translators so that you can appreciate why we believe them to be trustworthy. Let me begin with some of our European helpers. A Danish pastor who had to leave the state Lutheran church because of the truth. He greatly loves RFPA material. A blogger in northern France who is seeking to counteract heresies concerning justification from the New Perspective on Paul and John Piper circles. A Hungarian doctor of law whose...

Previous article in this series: December 15, 2018, p. 141. Translations A number of people ask about the translations that are on the Covenant PRC website (www.cprf.co.uk/languages.htm), so let me tell you first how this foreign language witness started. The translations began in large part as a response to criticism. It was said, scurrilously, that our congregation in Northern Ireland was merely Dutch or merely American, as if God’s truth were nationalistic and not heavenly! So we decided to demonstrate the catholicity of our apostolic faith and spread the Word further. A key person in this is Felipe Sabino, a...

Default position The typical professing evangelical Christian in our day, sadly, is a long way from being able to confess the Reformed faith as summed in our “Three Forms of Unity” and become a member in one of our Reformed churches. In all likelihood, he (or she) holds some Arminian ideas. Even if he calls himself a Calvinist, he probably thinks that God loves everybody, that Christ died for all men head for head (at least in some sense), and that God earnestly desires to save everybody. Romans 9 does not come into it! In eschatology, our representative evangelical is...

It is not claiming too much to say that the great Reformation of the church included a battle over the very nature of the church of Christ itself!1 1) The battle against Rome The Reformers fought against the false definition of the church that was deeply entrenched in the corrupt medieval church in Western Europe. According to Rome, the church is (well-nigh exclusively) an institutional church, that hierarchical organization with the pope as her visible head. Moreover, the church is not even her people but her “clergy”—priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. Besides defining the church institutionally, Rome proclaimed herself as...

As his name would indicate, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1455-1536) was a Frenchman from Étaples, a coastal town south of Calais, in Picardy. His surname is sometimes given as Fabry or Fabri, and he is also known by the Latin form of his name: Jacobus Faber Stapulensis. Although this sounds complicated, it is worth bearing in mind if you look him up online or in books and articles dealing with the Reformation, along with the men and ideas that prepared the way for it. Unlike the other individuals treated in this special Reformation Day issue of the SB, Jacques Lefèvre...

The Way to Heaven, by John Philips (1585-1663), edited by C. Matthew McMahon & Therese McMahon. Puritan Publications, USA, 2013. 120 pages. Paperback $14.99, eBook $7.99. [Reviewed by Rev. Angus Stewart.] Some in our day claim that it is Roman Catholic or “extreme” to teach that outside the church there is no salvation (Latin: extra ecclesiam nulla salus), even though this has been a teaching of the historic Christian church from the church fathers onwards, including the Reformers, their successors, and the Reformation creeds: Luther’s Larger Catechism, the Catechism of the Church of Geneva, Belgic Confession 28, Second Helvetic Confession...

Prayer, Praise and Prophecy: A Theology of the Psalms, Geoffrey W. Grogan. United Kingdom: Christian Focus Publications, repr. 2009. Hardback, 290 pp. ISBN: 9781857926422. [Reviewed by Rev. Angus Stewart.] Profound insights into the Book of Psalms have been provided in pithy statements by the two greatest Reformers. Luther averred that the Psalms are “a Bible in miniature” (157). Referring to their spiritual analysis of and power over us, Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy of the soul.” Geoffrey Grogan, a British evangelical who died in 2011, also loved and was excited by the Psalms (9), declaring this book “an inexhaustible,...

I think the right method of preaching is this. At our first beginning to preach at any place, after a general declara­tion of the love of God to sinners and his willingness that they should be saved, to preach the law in the stron­gest, the closest, and the most searching manner possible; only intermixng the gospel here and there, and shewing it, as it were, afar off…. I mean by preaching the gospel, preaching the love of God to sinners, preaching the life, death, resurrection, and intercession of Christ, with all the blessings which in consequence thereof are freely given...