“Then he began to call down curses on himself, and he swore to them ‘I don’t know the man.’ Immediately a rooster crowed . . . . And he went outside and wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:74, 75). Evidently in the early hours of Friday morning all this took place. By nine o’clock Jesus would be […]
We must “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3) with all who trust and obey the Lord and His Word at the same time as we must “have no fellowship” (5:11) with the work of those who reject Him and His Word. That is […]
Evangelical Christian missions are coming under criticism today for having failed to properly “contextualize” the Christian message so as to make it more acceptable to the receivers. Two previous articles have shown how that criticism ignores much of the long history of those missions and that it fails to do justice to the real theological […]
Occasionally we run into a catchy observation about some detail of our experience that has far-reaching implications. I ran into one of these last year in one of my courses. The statement read, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This saying was applied to the fossil record. indicating that when […]
B. THE DIACONATE IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 1. Deacons In the Early Church The diaconate as such is explicated in the earliest Christian sources outside the New Testament in The First Letter of Clement (pre 96-A.D), The Shepherd of Hermas. the Didache, and in Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians. where the diaconate is […]
The time has come for the evangelical Christian church in general, and the Christian Reformed Church in particular. to more carefully define and profess the Biblical doctrines of the creation of man and the Fall. We must draw a line in affirming and defending the doctrine that Adam and Eve were real, historical persons […]
Past Development The Christian Reformed Church has been known for many years as one of the strongest Reformed churches in this country. From a very small beginning of four small congregations in 1857 it grew into a sizable denomination. It did not rival the size of many of the other denominations in our land, but […]
It is now nearly 40 years ago that we were recruited to join a few veteran missionaries in seeking to reestablish our denomination’s mission in mainland China after the interruption of World War II. There we were two or three foreign families and a couple of single workers confronted with the question of how so […]
The Van Dyken family moved from Montana to Ripon, California in 1919. Harry was two years of age. By the time he entered Calvin College he had served in the army, married Wilhelmina Van Andel, engaged in farming, served as a deacon, become an electrician and was associated in business with other members of his […]