Dear friends

This week I’m hoping that you can help me prepare for a major talk that I’m giving in a few weeks time at the Nexus Conference (on March 11 here in Sydney). 

Nexus is an annual ministry conference for the evangelicals of greater Sydney to get together in person for the day, to encourage each other, and to stretch and challenge each other. (If you’re in Sydney and haven’t signed up yet, here’s where you can do that!) 

This year the conference is about how to move from theology to practice—because I think this is one of our weaknesses. As Reformed evangelicals, we tend to be very united on classic biblical doctrine, and very good at expounding the Scriptures. But we’re not as good, and certainly not as united, about how our theology filters down into the practical and moral issues of our ministries. 

Sometimes our differences will simply be differences in context, history and circumstance. We should expect practices to work themselves out differently in different places. But very often our differences reveal not so much that we read different passages differently, or even that we have different theological principles, but that we have different methods or approaches for applying theology to our practice. Or perhaps, we don’t really know how to apply our theology to our practice, and so we just kind of wing it. 

And so in today’s episode, Phillip and I have a chat about one of the angles I’m reading and thinking about in preparation for my talk at Nexus—the historical angle. We’ve faced these kinds of battles before, in the historic debates that took place between Protestant evangelicals, during and after the Reformation, about what their new Reformed doctrine should mean for practice. Those debates gave rise to two contrasting approaches to applying the Bible to our practice, often called the ‘Regulative Principle’ and the ‘Normative Principle’. In this week’s Two Ways News we explore these historic debates, and begin to suggest a better way forward. 

I hope you find it stimulating, and that you’ll get in touch and help me improve my thinking in advance of the conference! 

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe