All Articles For Contending for the Faith

Rev. Woudenberg is pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Very shortly after hearing from Dr. DeJong of the Clarion magazine (which letter appeared in the April 1 issue of the SB), there appeared a letter in the Christian Renewal reflecting on the same matters, namely, the problems between the Protestant Reformed and Liberated Churches. And accordingly my answer reflected on much of the same material we considered in recent articles; but my feeling is that it warrants reprinting. Many times through the years efforts have been made to make the Declaration of Principles appear to have been...

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.  Colossians 2:8 Few things enable us to understand better what happened between the Rev. Herman Hoeksema and Dr. Klaas Schilder during the decade of the forties than the realization of the close similarity of the covenant view of Rev. Hoeksema to that of Dr. Herman Bavinck, by every measure the greatest and most balanced scholar of the Secession, if not of all Dutch...

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?  I Corinthians 14:8 There is something troubling about this little book of Dr. Schilder’s entitled, Extra-Scriptural Binding — A New Danger. Clearly it was intended to be a response to our Brief Declaration of Principles; and Dr. Schilder has the reputation of having been a keen polemicist who could zero in on the heart of a problem and analyze it decisively. Here, however, we find something quite different, an almost uncertain groping about for some...

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all. Romans 4:16

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. Exodus 4:24, 25 Schilder, in the 24th chapter of his little book, Extra-Scriptural Binding, remarks, “I myself do not want to be either a supralap—sarian or an infralapsarian.” One wonders what he meant. As he certainly knew, the lapsarian...

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go. Proverbs 22:24 Schilder was clearly angry. He had received Hoeksema’s first response to the extended series of articles he had been writing about our Declaration of Principles, and he didn’t like it. He said: The fact that I now provisionally stop finds its reason in an article from the Standard Bearer of February 15, 1951, which I received by airmail. In this article colleague Hoeksema begins to write something about my series of...

Rev. Woudenberg is a minister emeritus in the Protestant Reformed Churches. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.  Acts 2:39. Having examined the history of the Schilder/Hoeksema controversy at some length, it is perhaps time to focus our attention now on the doctrinal aspects of it. And that leads us, first of all, to the question of what Schilder and the Liberated actually had in mind when they spoke of the “covenant.” For us this is not an easy question....

In our previous article we were discussing the grounds which Tertullian advanced in support of his opposition to the baptism of infants. And we concluded the article by calling attention to the second ground for his rejection of this practice, namely that an innocent child needed no cleansing from sin. A third ground advanced by Tertullian concerns the consequent responsibility to the sponsors. “For,” we hear him say, “why is it necessary—if (baptism itself) is not so necessary—that the sponsors likewise should be thrust into danger?

There was at this time a controversy about the purity of the Church and the question of Church discipline between the Donatists and the Church Catholic, whose view was represented and defended by Augustine. The Donatists were a schismatic party in North Africa. When we speak here of the Church Catholic we must not confuse this with the present Roman Catholic Church, but with the Old Catholic Church as it existed during and immediately upon the age of the apostles.

Continuing with Philip Schaff’s description of Julian’s ruthless attempt to destroy Christianity, we quote the following, Vol. III, 52, ff.