Journal: Puritan Reformed Journal
Volume: PRJ 05:2 (Jul 2013)
Article: From The Editors
Author: Anonymous

PRJ 5:2 (July 2013) p. 1

From The Editors

Key to life in the kingdom of Christ are relationships: relationship with God and His people and those in the world outside. And vital in the area of relationships between God’s people is what we currently call mentoring: where truth—in all of its dimensions—is personally passed on by one believer to another. In our first essay in the area of biblical studies, David van Brugge examines the way that Exodus 18, the story of Jethro and his son-in-law Moses, powerfully reveals the way that “God uses mentoring relationships to preserve His church,” bring glory to His Name, and be a witness of loving service to a watching world. Then Michael Barrett, our academic dean, examines the teaching of the little-read minor prophet Obadiah and in the process reminds us that all of Scripture is vital for the nurture and training of the people of God. The final essay in the section on biblical studies looks at the subject of repentance in the prophet Isaiah. In it, Samuel Emadi examines the complex way that Isaiah deals with this subject: not only does he encourage repentance as a way to avoid judgment in his day but, since repentance will not be largely forthcoming at that time, it is bound up with God’s larger purposes in future history.

In systematic and historical theology we have a cornucopia of essays. Richard Daniels details how Christ’s fully obedient life is absolutely vital for our salvation—without it we could receive nothing from the Father: “Without this, there is no union with Christ, no regeneration, no faith, and hence no personal entrance into the justified condition.” Through an examination of John Knox’s interaction with the Anabaptist Robert Cooche, Jae-Eun Park then gives us a new angle on John Knox’s doctrine of predestination, by showing the way it relates to his understanding of the church. Stephen Yuille studies the influential Puritan William Perkins’s thought on how God prepares the heart to receive his grace and our president Joel Beeke has an essay on John Bunyan’s thinking about justification, which is of significance for contemporary discussions about this key area of theology. Maarten Kuivenhoven’s essay on slavery in the ethical thought of two Puritans, Richard Baxter and William Gouge, is an excellent

PRJ 5:2 (July 2013) p. 2

example of how to respond in a scholarly fashion to a pressing issue that has come up recently through a rap song, of all things: to what extent were the Puritans children of their times? How did they deal with a major ethical issue of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely, European involvement in slavery? The final paper in this section, by Stanley McKenzie, looks at the pietism of Philipp Spener and Jodocus van Lodenstein...