Girardeau, John L. The Federal Theology: Its Import and Its
Regulative Influence.
Reformed Academic Press, P. O. Box 8599,
Greenville, S.C. 29604.
55 pages. ISBN 1-884416-05-5
John L. Girardeau (1825-1998) was a successful pastor who among
other charges, founded Zion Presbyterian Church in Charleston and building it
from 36 black members to an average attendance of 1500 each Sunday. He was for many years professor of Didactic
and Polemic Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. He had been taught theology by James Henley
Thornwell. He was an ally of Robert
Lewis Dabney in opposition to the evolutionary teaching of Dr. James Woodrow of
Columbia, a bitter issue in the old Presbyterian Church U.S.
This little book is an address that Dr. Girardeau gave on November
7, 1881, to the Columbia Theological Seminary Alumni Association. He feared that the institutions of the
church were departing from federal theology, and that this departure did not bode
well for the future of the Church. His
fears have been realized. The influence
of rationalism, evangelical Arminianism, dispensationalism, and reductionism
have resulted in such an attenuation of theology that the voice of the covenant
is hardly heard among us any more. It
is only used nowadays, it seems, is when it is necessary to drag it out, dust
it off, and use it in defense of infant baptism, or restrictive communion. That it might possible have wider
significance is lost even to many Reformed and Presbyterian bodies. Individualism, emotionalism, pretended and
imagined revelations and experiences have well now silenced the voice of
Scripture in the pulpits of the nation.
With crystal clarity, Dr. Girardeau sets forth the biblical
doctrine of the Federal Headship of Adam and the Federal Headship of the Last
Adam, the Savior Jesus Christ.
Ministers should read this little book, and let their pulpits again ring
the changes on the fundamental doctrine of Scripture. If we are going to be delivered from the smothering effects of
charismatic and other irrational movement, and have our confidence restored in
the inerrant Scriptures, this great doctrine must again be preached and
believed.
The value of the book is enhanced by a bibliography of Covenant
Theology by J. Ligon Duncan III.
Johnson, Phillip E.
Defeating Darwinism.
InterVarsity Press, P. O. Box 1400,
Downers Grove, Illinois 60515.
1997. 131 pages ISBN 0-8308-1362-4
This dynamite little book was written for high school students or
others who desire to successful confront Darwinism. The writer is the author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the
Balance, which have rocked the evolutionary world. Dr. Johnson teaches us how to develop a “baloney detectors” to
see the fallacies of what they hear in schools, and how to successfully
confront the issues, by going to the underlying presuppositions of Darwinism
such as materialism, and dishonest logical devices as appeals to
authority, attacking straw men, begging
the question, and shifting definitions.
This book ought to be in every church library, promoted, and given away
to young people.
Macleod, Donald. Shared Life, The Trinity and the Fellowship of God’s People.
Reformed Academic Press, P. O. Box 8599,
Greenville SC 29604. 1994.
[Originally published by Scripture Union,
London, England 1987. Limited permission granted to Reformed
Academic Press for publication of 200 copies in the U. S.] 96 pages
What a fantastic little book!
Dr. Macleod is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Free Church of
Scotland College, Edinburgh, and is editor of The Monthly Record. This little book has the clearest
exposition of the orthodox and traditional doctrine of the Trinity that this
reviewer has seen. Fully in agreement
with the great creedal statements of Nicea, Chalcedon, and the great Protestant
Confessions, Professor Macleod has found a way to express this difficult
doctrines in clear and understandable terms.
He even deals with the filioque and knows it is important!
Most Christians in America profess belief in the doctrine of the
Trinity, but the value of Dr. Macleod’s work is that he applies the doctrine to
the life of the Christian in the home, the church, and the community. Instead of a dry theological concept useful
to bash heretics, the doctrine of the Trinity comes alive in its application to
the peace, love, and communion that ought to exist in the congregations of the
faithful.
Lubenow, Marvin L. Bones of Contention.
Baker Books, P. O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids,
MI 49516-6287. 1997.
ISBN 0-8010-5677-2 295 pages.
The fossil records proves evolution. Right? Evolution is a
fact. Right? We cannot explain everything, just as we cannot explain
everything about light, but the fossil record has established evolution as a
fact as surely as light is a fact.
Right? Professor Marvin L.
Lubenow [Professor of Bible and Apologetics at Christian Heritage College, El
Cajon, California] says “WRONG!” on all counts.
The fossils simply don’t line up the way evolutionists pretend
that they do. Fossils charts are
seldom included in school text books anymore, because they show the wrong
things. Professor Lubenow simply sets
it all out in charts for everyone to see.
He documents the shifts and backtracks of evolutionists with great
clarity and charity. He is no raving
polemicist, but he does not allow bias and prejudice to be passed off as honest
“self-correction” of scientific method.
Wedgewood,
C. V. William the Silent.
Book of the Month Club, 1997. Originally published 1944.
253 pages. ISBN (None in my copy)
Kaman, Henry. Philip of Spain.
Yale University Press, New Haven,
1997.
ISBN 0-300-07081-0. 321 pages.
Ms. Wedgewood is a distinguished historian who has had her work
republished by the Book of the Month Club.
In addition to William the Silent, she also authored The Great
Rebellion, a trilogy on the Parliament/Charles I civil war in England that
ended feudal monarchy and set the stage for the constitutional monarchy of 1688
under William and Mary.
All the glory, tragedy, and drama of the Dutch rebellion against
Philip II of Spain (for a great companion volume see Henry Kaman's Philip of
Spain) is captured in William. The
author is more interested in the human elements than the complex political and
religious causes of the conflict. She
is more disposed to take the reasons expressed by those who lived during the
times than to assign reasons from a distance.
The latter approach is also legitimate, for often those who live through
turbulent times are not conscious of motives and explanations that may be
revealed later. But it is also
important to understand what the actors say is their reasons. All men are liars, but they do not lie all
the time.
In this volume, William, the Silent, of Nassau, Prince of Orange,
emerges as a tender-hearted man, who dearly loved his family, and dearly loved
the people of the Netherlands. Much
more modern in his view of persecution than most of his contemporaries, he
could see beyond the religious labels--Roman, Lutheran, Calvinist,
Anabaptist--to see the man who was suffering.
To him it was all one--the men of the Netherlands were his people, and
he did not want them to suffer, no matter what their religion. In this he was very modern, and a New Man
for his age. This new model was already
emerging in France, where men were Frenchmen first, and then Catholic; and was
also coming of age in Elizabeth's England, where Philip found to his chagrin
that even Catholic Englishmen were Englishmen, and specifically Elizabeth's
English men, before they were Catholic.
From the conflict in the Netherlands emerged a most modern
document, William's famous Apology, which justified the rebellion, which he
laid before the Estates of the Netherlands in December, 1580. In the old world it was not sufficient to
be successful in rebellion, you must justify it in terms of the law. Without such justification, any prince in
Europe could turn on William and the Dutch people and treat them as outcast, to
be betrayed and deserted.
William's coup in the Apology was to turn the tables on Philip II,
just as Cromwell was to do to Charles I in England. It was Philip who had failed in his duty. It was Philip who had broken the covenant
and the law. It was Philip who had
waged war on the Netherlands and had betrayed his trust. In this William was strongly influenced by
the Frenchman, Duplessis Mornay, who was a resident at William's court, and had
recently published Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The new theory in these works was the Calvinistic theory that
when the sovereign fails in his duty, the people are not only justified, but
morally bound, to dethrone him. It was
this theory that brought many a night's unease to the crowned heads of Europe,
and would cause many of them to fall in the next centuries. The Calvinist philosophy is also seen in
Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence for the colonies of England in
America.
The underlying presupposition of the Calvinist idea is that both
sovereign and people are under law.
Both the sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of the government
are rejected in terms of God as the source of law. To this, both people and government must submit. Tyranny was the imposition of law not from
God, which were therefore to be rejected and not obeyed.
William of Orange never saw the realization of the fruit of his
struggle. He was assassinated by a
derelict who desired to collect the bounty placed on William's head by the king
of Spain. The fruit was to come to the
descendents of William: Maurice, the
frail son of William's mad 2nd wife, one of the world's great military
geniuses; Frederick Henry, his youngest son whose name would stand for the
Golden Age of Dutch history; and his grandson William III, who with his wife
Mary, ascended the English throne in 1688 in the Glorious Revolution that would
establish the Reformation firmly in England, and make the name Orange
synonymous with Calvinistic liberty.
Philip II and Spain never recovered from the disaster of the Dutch
rebellion. Four years after the death
of William, Philip launched the Great Armada against Elizabeth of England, to
punish her for the execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and for her
clandestine help of the Dutch rebellion.
The Armada's disaster, coupled with the losses in the Netherlands, left
Philip's treasury exhausted. Ten years
later he was dead, his body rotted away with gout, his spirit tormented with
failure, despised by his own people for the fruitless wars against the Dutch,
the English, and the French. Certain
of his own divine right as king, certain that the Catholic faith was the true
faith, certain that his motives were pure and his goals godly, he had
nevertheless ruined his empire with war, debt, and decay. He never understood the changes in the world. Thus may it always be with tyrants.