“You must not be so conceited as to think that only those in your churches are going to heaven. If I stay in my own church, I’ll get to heaven just as well as you will.” Such speech the militant prophet often hears when he fights for the truth, as he is called of God to do for the praise of His name.
In our last article we quoted Dr. A. Kuyper Sr. We noticed, that he most emphatically takes the position that it is both grammatically and exegetically correct to explain the phrase “and that is not out of you, it is the gift of God” as referring to “faith” in the former clause and not to the entire sentence. Paul here, accordingly, singles out faith through which we are saved as being the gift of God.
April 24, 1950 Esteemed Editor:
“As to Conditions” is the title of Rev. Petter’s article in the Concordia for April 27. The writing contains also this statement, “We may recall here in parenthesis that Rev. Ophoff (Standard Bearer, Vol. 2, pp. 46, 47) defends the conditionality of the promise in Canons 11:5” The reference is to Vol. 2.
Supralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism
The question therefore is: what does the Heidelberg Catechism means when it instructs us “that he feeds and nourishes my soul to everlasting life, with his crucified body and shed blood,” and that to eat the crucified body and drink the shed blood of Christ means “to become more and more united with his sacred body, by the Holy Ghost, who dwells both in Christ and in us; so that we, though Christ is in heaven and we on earth, are notwithstanding ‘flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone;’ and that we live, and are governed forever by
Before I proceeds with my discussion of condition, I want to call the attention of our readers to something I wrote almost twenty years ago, and in which I apparently teach conditions myself. I refer the reader to Volume VI, page 90, ff., of the Standard Bearer, This passage occurs in a series of articles which have been published in pamphlet form under the title, Calvin, Berkhof, and H. J. Kuiper. I call attention to this passage for the following reasons.
