When God Converts a Sinner: Confessional Perspectives on Justification and the Christian Life

In an age of theological innovation and doctrinal discount, the heritage of evangelical Reformed theology is in increasing danger of betrayal. Old established understandings of "the faith once delivered to the saints" are under attack, disturbing the peace of the church, tarnishing its witness, and challenging its purity. Against the pressures of newer fashions in thought, Douglas Vickers here returns to the seventeenth-century confessions of faith and illustrates from successive chapters common to three of those confessions the ways in which, and the reasons why, traditional beliefs and doctrinal constructions are to be preserved. Among questions examined with biblically informed insight are the relation between eternity and time and its significance for the gospel of redemption, the meaning and function of saving faith, the accomplishment of redemption by the incarnate Christ, the significance of his heavenly high priestly office, the high doctrine of the Christian believer's union with Christ, and the implications these doctrinal realities hold for the Christian life. In a discussion of contemporary theologies, When God Converts a Sinner examines such innovations as the New Perspective on Paul, Federal Vision theology, Shepherdism, and other attempts to effect a paradigm shift in historically received theology.

Douglas Vickers (PhD, University of London) is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. Among his recent titles in theology are Discovering the Christian Mind: Reason and Belief in Christian Confession (2011) and The Cross: Its Meaning and Message in a Postmodern World (2010).