"No Creed But Christ"?!?!

While we may be sincere in saying that we have "no creed but Christ" and subscribe to no "man-made" system of theology like Calvinism or Arminianism, let's face the music. The music being that whatever we say about how God saves sinners ends up fitting into a historic theological category and ends up being associated with a particular "ism." So rather than pietistic sounding boasts of biblicism, there are times when it is helpful to see where one fits historically as we seek to be as biblical as we can be for the glory of Christ. This brings us to our next chapter in Warfield's The Plan of Salvation which is the chapter called Calvinism. Read the chapter for Tuesday, December 4th and be edified. 

Sacerdotalism's Up Next

The next religious system evaluated by Warfield is sacerdotalism. Read chapter three of The Plan of Salvation and we will see you on Tuesday morning at 6:30. Resource Alert: To learn more about what we talked about at our last meeting, check out The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination which is available gratis online. See especially the chapter called "Total Inability." I commend the entire book as a great resource.

Autosoterism

If nothing else, theology for breakfast is bound to broaden your vocabulary! Hopefully it is doing much more! Read chapter two on Autosoterism (self-salvation) for next week, November 13. It may also help to review the chart at the end of chapter 1 in the actual book. I leave you with this evaluation of Warfield by one of his theological foes: "Dr. Warfield had the finest mind ever to teach at Princeton Seminary."

The Lion of Princeton

B.B. Warfield was affectionately known as "the Lion of Princeton." The moniker underscored his academic and theological prowess. Benjamin taught theology at Princeton from 1887 to 1921 where he seemingly never backed down from opportunities to promote and defend the truthfulness of Scripture, the supremacy of Christ, and gospel of sovereign grace. For the next five weeks we will work through The Plan of Salvation which is "A study of the basic and essential differences between various interpretations of the Christian religion" (the publisher). Have the first chapter ("Differing Conceptions") read for Tuesday, November 6th. The book is free here, 99 cents on Kindle, or available at the OBC bookstore.

Christians are "strangers and aliens" in this world (1 Peter 1:1). This means we are something like the exiled Israelites of old and can learn a great deal about our relation to culture from God's expectation during the exile. Our discussion on 10/2 of ch.4 was very helpful in this regard. Valuable discussion men! 10/9 will carry this further as we cover chapter 5. The next book will be a little one by B.B. Warfield called The Plan of Salvation. You can pick it up at OBC, on Amazon, or digitally for free  here.