The Synod of Dort is a model of the church at work, expressing the mind and hearts of the saints as they reflected deeply on the Word of God. 

A pastoral concern for the well-being of Christ’s sheep motivated the Synod of Dort from its inception to the final formulation of its statements.  

One of the first points the orthodox Reformed reaffirmed years before the Great Synod of Dort is that God freely offers salvation to all in the “serious” and “promiscuous” or free and well-meant offer of the gospel.  

Did Jesus make salvation possible for all or did he actually save his people from their sins?

We will consider the historical and theological background to the synod, examining particularly the role of Arminius.

We will consider the historical and theological background to the synod, examining particularly the role of Arminius. 

Scripture’s narratives present preachers with pitfalls and privilege. Pitfalls include abstracting timeless life-lessons from the drama experienced by fleshand-blood people, and putting ourselves in the spotlight, leaving Christ in the shadow. Yet narratives offer the privilege to introduce multidimensional, broken people to the real Hero of the Big Story, the multidimensional, allsufficient Lord and Savior.

Good stories are never just stories. Authors by what they include and what they exclude and by how they structure their stories are doing more than developing a plot; they are making a point. Reflecting on the narratives of great literature can help us learn more from the narratives of the Bible.

How does the Bible relate to itself in its own system of cross-referencing? Now that is a BIG topic! Biblical writers frequently refer to other biblical books in a wide variety of ways: direct quote, subtle citation, allusion, or ‘echo’ or ‘reminiscence’. How allusions work in literature and biblical literature especially have not been well understood until recently. This talk will engage some of the latest theoretical work on understanding how allusions function. The first part of this talk will cover how one can develop ‘allusion competence’ when reading biblical narratives. The second part of the talk will illustrate through specific biblical examples how the archeology of allusion hunting can result in a richer understanding of biblical narratives from both Old Testament and New Testament.

The stories of Scripture provide more than just information or a broad background for understanding biblical truth. These stories not only allow us to see our doctrine in action but in many cases they actually become part of our doctrine itself

Faculty panel question and answer session.

It is essential to the Christian faith that we affirm the historical nature of God’s stories in the Bible. They are testimonies and witnesses to real people and events. God has acted in history! Nevertheless, the Bible’s stories do not read like a newspaper account or a modern history book. The way the authors of Scripture wrote history is different in many ways from what we expect. Thus we need to carefully examine how the Bible writes history lest we misinterpret it as we bring our assumptions to the text. 

In this particular lecture, we explore not only what the Bible says, but how the Bible says it, focusing on the narratives of the Bible. Each narrative is a carefully-crafted historical story of Jesus Christ, a story that employs the artistic and literary conventions of the time and told by authors who offer their unique and personal perspectives. Reading the narratives more carefully can help us to better read and enjoy the Word of God

2017 Faculty Conference Question and Answer Panel.

One of the key outcomes of the Protestant Reformation was the recovery of a biblical ecclesiology, or the doctrine of the church. Luther and other Reformers emphasized the priesthood of all believers over and against the hierarchical systems found in the Roman Catholic Church. 

There is no shortage of “gospel” things, from gospel music to gospel vacations. But what is the gospel itself and has it become captive to agendas that bear a loose relationship to the redemption in Christ that we find in the Scriptures?  

The Roman Catholic Church maintains there is an ecclesiastical hierarchy that has the pope as its pinnacle, but Protestant Reformers challenged this notion. They rejected the claims of papal authority and returned Christ to his sole place of preeminence.

That the Reformation principle of sola scriptura is often challenged in the halls of academia and often ridiculed in popular media should not surprise us. What is surprising, however, is the lack of focus and dependence upon the Bible among churches and believers.

The Reformation recovered the biblical Gospel, not provisionally, but definitively. We need it today as every generation has needed it.

The church has already read the Scriptures but she has not always read them well. For much of its history the church read Scripture under the influence of powerful assumptions, which blinded her to vitally important truths.