Sublime

B. B. Warfield’s

I heard John Stott say that some people had been talking about “the irreducible minimum gospel.” He dismissed such an idea. “Who wants an irreducible minimum gospel?” he asked. “I want the full, biblical gospel.”

Thomas Boston and his friends believed that “the gospel-doctrine” had been attacked in the Marrow Controversy.

Taken as a whole, the church clearly can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it. Almost all Christian churches say something in their formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible

The question for those of us in the West, and particularly in America, is this—Why have we chosen to construct such fragile church systems? Why do we build ministries that rely upon a single fallible leader, one dynamic speaker, or that require massive and unsustainable amounts of money? Our devotion to fragile systems means as the pace of

Granted, I think many renditions of Christian worship—reflecting what we might call “refueling” models—are subject to the same disappointments and frustrations.

In our day, two opposing forces challenge the effective exposition of the Word of God. The first well-documented foe of the gospel is the erosion of authority.