Guidebook For Instruction In The Christian Religion

"In writing this Guidebook," Bavinck says in his preface, "I had in mind, the pupils in the highest classes of our Christian gymnasium, public schools, in the education of teachers, and in normal schools, etc. and moreover those who desire to understand the main content of our Christian, Reformed confession of faith through a not too comprehensive or expensive book." Herman Bavinck completed Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion in 1913 and reprinted it in the Netherlands in 1931. He originally intended it for high school students and Christians of every confession. Bavinck's goal was to make Christians more familiar with the rich, deep thoughts of Scripture as universally expressed in the Christian faith. Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion is an introductory systematic theology by one of the foremost theologians of the past century. Alongside The Sacrifice of Praise, this is Bavinck at his best doing catechetical theology. To this end, Bavinck sets off to explain in a simplified manner the main contents of the Christian religion, even giving it a title that is a tip of the hat to John Calvin's Institute of the Christian Religion. While Bavinck's lengthy Reformed Dogmatics is an academic work, Guidebook for Instruction serves a more egalitarian aim. It is a theological guide for the everyday person in the pew. In this one--and much shorter--volume, Bavinck walks Christian readers through all the major topics covered in Reformed Dogmatics with theological depth and insight.

“In writing this Guidebook,” Bavinck says in his preface, “I had in mind, the pupils in the highest classes of our Christian gymnasium, public schools, in the education of teachers, and in normal schools, etc. and moreover those who desire to understand the main content of our Christian, Reformed confession of faith through a not too comprehensive or expensive book.” Herman Bavinck completed Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion in 1913 and reprinted it in the Netherlands in 1931. He originally intended it for high school students and Christians of every confession. Bavinck’s goal was to make Christians more familiar with the rich, deep thoughts of Scripture as universally expressed in the Christian faith. Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion is an introductory systematic theology by one of the foremost theologians of the past century. Alongside The Sacrifice of Praise, this is Bavinck at his best doing catechetical theology. To this end, Bavinck sets off to explain in a simplified manner the main contents of the Christian religion, even giving it a title that is a tip of the hat to John Calvin’s Institute of the Christian Religion. While Bavinck’s lengthy Reformed Dogmatics is an academic work, Guidebook for Instruction serves a more egalitarian aim. It is a theological guide for the everyday person in the pew. In this one—and much shorter—volume, Bavinck walks Christian readers through all the major topics covered in Reformed Dogmatics with theological depth and insight.

In this book, Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) provides a historical sketch on the nature of Christianity and the unifying power of Christ. He proceeds from unity to diversity—on where the Christian church agrees to the areas where it differs. It is apologetic and evangelistic, ecumenical and Reformed, and historical and theological in scope. In this succinct book, Bavinck traces the history of Christian doctrine and life, distinguishing the East from the West, and then focusing on the West through the Reformation to the twentieth century. Both at the beginning and the end of the book, he places before the reader what he deemed the most important religious and theological question of the day: Who is Jesus? “It is no small task which Dr. Bavinck has undertaken, to tell in sixty-two small pages all that Christianity is, and that, in a series in which it is brought into comparison with other ‘great religions’. He has fulfilled this task, however, in a most admirable manner. His method is, first, to point out what all Christians are agreed upon; and then to give an historical account of Christianity in its origins and it its progressive manifestations in the great forms of the Orthodox Eastern, the Romish, the Lutheran, Reformed Churches, with further descriptions of the forms it has taken since, in Anabaptism and Socinianism, and the New Protestantism rooted in the Enlightenment. His plan thus resolves itself into an informal sketch of the historical development of Christianity. This sketch is written with remarkable grasp of details and an equally remarkable power of synthesis. We cannot imagine how the work could be done better.” —B.B. Warfield

The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction examines four postmodern texts whose authors play with the material conventions of "the book": Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carole Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula's VAS (2003). By demonstrating how each of these works calls for an affirmative engagement with literature, Flore Chevaillier explores a centrally important issue in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Critics have claimed that experimental literature, in its disruption of conventional story-telling and language uses, resists literary and social customs. While this account is accurate, it stresses what experimental texts respond to more than what they offer. This book proposes a counter-view to this emphasis on the strictly privative character of innovative fictions by examining experimental works' positive ideas and affects, as well as readers' engagement in the formal pleasure of experimentations with image, print, sound, page, orthography, and syntax. Elaborating an erotics of recent innovative literature implies that we engage in the formal pleasure of its experimentations with signifying techniques and with the materiality of their medium. Such engagement provokes a fusion of the reader's senses and the textual material, which invites a redefinition of corporeality as a kind of textual practice.

This book is a catechism: basic biblical instruction in question and answer format. It is a discipleship tool. It is a guidebook. It is inherently practical and simple to use: The are 52 lessons, one for each Lord's Day. I pray God will use this book to help you grow in and to teach biblical truth and Christian living for the glory of God. I pray the Spirit would use it to bless you. Catechism means instruction. It comes from the Greek word katecheo, which means to instruct or teach. The verb is found, for example, in Luke 1:4 and Acts 18:25. My Only Comfort in Life and Death--a phrase which comes from the first lesson--is essentially a republication of Hercules Collins' An Orthodox Catechism (1680), which is a Baptist version of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563). I have made few and slight revisions strictly for practical purposes, such as readability. The essence of the catechism is the three-part structure of MISERY, DELIVERANCE, AND GRATITUDE. The first part deals with the misery of sin, the second part deals with deliverance in Christ, and the third part deals with the gratitude of those delivered as expressed in true, Spirit-wrought Christian living.The difference between GOD'S LAW AND GOD'S GOSPEL is key to understanding the catechism and a proper approach to Christian living. The law exposes sin, but it cannot deliver--or help deliver--us from sin. Only Christ as revealed in the gospel can deliver us from sin. Christ alone is righteous. Righteousness can only be found in him. To be delivered from sin, sinners must come to share in the blessings of Christ by faith, by virtue of his life, death, and resurrection, and by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the gospel.

OUR DEAR YOUNG MEN AND YOUNG WOMEN, we have great confidence in you. You are beloved sons and daughters of God and He is mindful of you. You have come to earth at a time of great opportunities and also of great challenges. The standards in this booklet will help you with the important choices you are making now and will yet make in the future. We promise that as you keep the covenants you have made and these standards, you will be blessed with the companionship of the Holy Ghost, your faith and testimony will grow stronger, and you will enjoy increasing happiness.

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Herman Bavinck's four-volume Reformed Dogmatics is one of the most important theological works of the twentieth century. The recently completed English translation has received wide acclaim. Now John Bolt, one of the world's leading experts on Bavinck and editor of Bavinck's four-volume set, has abridged the work in one volume, offering students, pastors, and lay readers an accessible summary of Bavinck's masterwork. This volume presents the core of Bavinck's thought and offers explanatory materials, making available to a wider audience some of the finest Dutch Reformed theology ever written. Praise for Reformed Dogmatics "Bavinck's magisterial Reformed Dogmatics remains after a century the supreme achievement of its kind."--J. I. Packer, Regent College