2017 Annual Conference: Is the Reformation Over?

The Gospel Recovered

W. Robert Godfrey

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

The Bible Restored

R. Scott Clark

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. In the Reformation, that veil was lifted and the Scriptures were restored to their rightful place in the theology, piety, and practice of the faith.

The Church Reformed

J. V. Fesko

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.

The Gospel Recast

Michael S. Horton

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? This talk focuses on various ways in which the gospel is being recast as a story about us rather than about the rescue operation of the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit.

The Church Reduced

Julius Kim

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. What Luther could not have expected, however, was that the Protestant church would gradually reduce itself to create “churches” of every stripe and color, where individual authority reigned supreme.

The Bible Relativized

Joel E. Kim

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, even among evangelicals. Not unlike the time of the Reformation, there is an urgent need to recover the centrality of the Bible.

Speaker Panel