July

This month I begin the first of a series of four posts on Bishop Tom Wright's book on justification.

I'll say this as a short preface to this series: It's a good thing to have a Bishop of the C of E debating the great things of the gospel. How many English bishops are there? Thirty? Forty? Two hundred? I've no idea. Their sepia features make them merge as one, the whole tribe apparently consumed by Anglican bureaucracy and political correctness

Where is there a theologian among them? Answer: There's one in Durham. So though, as I shall try to show, some of Bishop Tom's ideas on justification are off-centre, and his way of debating these matters is very strange (that is, if the idea is to home in on the truth), who can nonetheless fail to admire the commitment and industry of the man?

Side by side with the four posts on Wright on justification I shall be putting out four drafts of short extracts from a book, Calvin at the Centre, to be published by the Oxford University Press in November. The book is in central respects a sequel to John Calvin's Ideas, (OUP, 2004).

In a post on mental error, 'Hodge and Hymn Singing' I cited three Reformed theologians on the matter, without providing references. I am now in a position to reveal...that these are ....

(1) J.I.Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, 1958, 124
(2) Jonathan Edwards, Works, (Yale edition), 19, 242
(3) John Owen, Works, ( ed. Goold), 5, 163-4