The Ezra Institute Podcast for Cultural Reformation

This Christmas season, Joe Boot reflects on the staggering reality of God’s glory revealed to His people as he takes up residence, or tabernacles, among us. This fact ought to be a great source of strength for Christians, greater than any hardship we could ever experience.

Make a year-end donation to the Ezra Institute here.

Get the December/January book of the month, The Heidelberg Diary: Daily Devotions on the Heidelberg Catechism.

This Christmas season, we talk about the question of public, national worship, and the state in direct relation to God.

Read Joe Boot’s recent article on Diwali and Dechristianization

Start off 2023 with daily readings and meditations from the Heidelberg Catechism

In this episode Joe describes the influence that Thomas Aquinas has had on the field of Christian apologetics, and discusses the areas where the Thomistic approach falls short of vindicating the full Christian doctrine of God.

Joe’s classic apologetics work, A Time to Search, is available at Ezra Press.

Ezra Institute Fellow Dr. James White joins us this week to talk about the Protestant fascination with Aquinas, and the path that leads from Thomism to Roman Catholicism. Dr. White explains some of the reasons why Protestants are induced to follow Thomas, the fundamental issue of authority that is at stake, and what Thomas would have thought of the current Pope.

Get a philosophical assessment of Aquinas and Neo-Thomism from Ezra Press.

Joe Boot addresses the realm of medicine and healing, and demonstrates how much of the contemporary thinking surrounding medicine has been reduced to mere biology. In contrast, the Christian should think of health in terms of wholeness – both wholeness of the created reality, and wholeness in the sense of health.

Get tickets to the Mission of God Canada conference.

Read Keeping Faith in Medicine by Dr. Ted Fenske.

In this episode Joe Boot discusses the thought of Thomas Aquinas as it relates to the Christian understanding of history. To speak of history is inescapably to speak about God’s relation to and activity within His creation.

Get a reformational assessment of Thomas Aquinas and the Neo-Thomist Tradition at Ezra Press.

Register for the Mission of God Conference Canada, December 10.

This week in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, we examine the idea of natural law, and conclude that, as articulated by Aquinas, it is an idea that gives unwarranted scope to human reason, and effectively makes God equal with His law. In contrast, Scripture teaches that God is the source of all definition, and that human law must be positivized in an historical context.

We could have also titled this episode How the Reformation delivered us from ecclesiocracy. Here we discuss Aquinas’ political philosophy, the problem with his adoption of Aristotle’s teaching that man is a political animal, and the need for an utterly transcendent authority.

Get Joe Boot’s book Ruler of Kings.

Register for the Mission of God Canada conference

There is a common assumption in Christianity that at the fall, man lost a supernatural gift of grace, but retained his natural faculties intact and unscathed – including the faculty of reason. In this episode, Joe Boot explains that the biblical distinction is not nature and grace, but wrath and grace: those who belong to Christ and those who war against Him.

Read Joe’s recent Jubilee article on Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking.

Get tickets for the Mission of God Canada conference, December 10.

We have new music and a new theme as we get rolling in Season 6. In this episode we begin a short series on the life, thought, and influence of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval scholastic philosopher and theologian, introducing his person and major works, and considering why there seems to be a recent revival of interest amongst Reformed Protestants in this Roman Catholic thinker.

American listeners! We now offer domestic shipping rates from Ezra Press!