One week ago (January 23rd, 2019) the government of the state of New York enacted a bill legalizing abortion all the way up to delivery and legalized leaving infants to die who survive a botched abortion. The One World Trade Center was lit up in pink to celebrate this legislation, with the morbid irony that it has a monument to all the unborn children killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yesterday a Democratic delegate to the Virginia State Assembly defended a bill she submitted to the assembly that would allow abortion up until the moment of delivery, even if the baby is full-term and the mother is dilated…
This is a list of my top (i.e. favorite) posts from the past year. This list is most helpful for me to look back later to see what captured my attention during 2018.
- Why don’t we pray for arms to regrow? This posts addresses this question and discusses the nature of prayer and God’s will.
- I wrote several posts on the question of exceptions and scruples. This is a subject I intend to address again, but my focus over the past year was on the freedom of pastors to teach on a subject where they disagree with their confession of faith. My conclusions were that if a pastor is granted an exception, he is free to teach it and the presbytery cannot prohibit that teaching. However, a pastor being granted an exception does necessarily free him in his practice, and does not grant that exception to the congregation by proxy.
- I wrote an extensive analysis of the confessionalism of the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO). ECO and the EPC are closely related, and my hope in that analysis was to provide a charitable and robust critique of ECO’s confessional approach in order to better foster a deeper partnership between our churches.
- I wrote two very different posts on sexual ethics. The first is on children in the worship of the church when the scriptural subject is sex. The second was a biblical argument for adultery disqualifying elders from serving as elders again.
A list of my top posts from 2017 can be found here.
People who are part of a particular congregation are often called church “members.” This language is profoundly biblical, and is a visible, covenantal manifestation of the believer’s union with Christ.
μέλος (melos) is the Greek word used to describe the individual parts of a body (literally “body member”). For example, the tongue is an individual member of the body (James 3:5-6). μέλος is used metaphorically to describe the relationship between believers and Christ. Individual believers are all μέλη (members) of Christ (Romans 12:4-5), because we are in Christ. This union with Christ is total: even our bodies, as part of ourselves, are μέλη of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:15, Ephesians 5:29-30). We have been united to Christ as his members through the work of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). The abiding of John 14 is best described in terms of our union with Christ, our membership in and with him…
