Showing results by author "Jack Cottrell" in All Categories

This volume contains items that I have written on the subject of Calvinism. I have had a strong interest in this doctrinal system ever since I was an M.Div. student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (1962-1965). WTS at that time was a premiere Evangelical seminary, but was also most adamantly Calvinist in its theological orientation. During my years as a student there, I can remember no more than five other students besides myself that were not Calvinists. My teachers were respected Evangelical scholars as well as strict Calvinists.This affected me in two ways. First, I ...

". . . the content of almost all of my teaching, preaching, and writing has been presented via the method known as TOPICAL, i.e., subject by subject. I do not apologize for this, and I have no regrets for teaching Biblical and theological content in this manner. I will continue to do so as the occasion calls for it. It seems to have worked quite well so far.In the last decade or so, however, my style of teaching on the local church level has changed somewhat. Beginning with my part-time ministry at the Bright Christian Church (2007-2010), I became more interested in teaching the Bible book ...

"This present volume is divided into two parts, both of which deal with explaining and refuting false teachings. I take very seriously Paul’s inspired instructions to church elders and leaders in Titus 1:9, that they must “be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.” The contents of this book fall into the latter category.In my nearly forty-nine-year career as a seminary professor, I taught many courses that qualify as exhorting in sound doctrine; but I also taught several that focused on refuting those who contradict it. For many years I taught a two-...

Perhaps no Bible doctrine is more misunderstood than the Bible’s teaching on Christian baptism. In Baptism: Zwingli or the Bible, Dr. Cottrell explores the influence of the Reformer Huldreich Zwingli (A.D. 1484-1531) on the modern understanding of the meaning and purpose of baptism.

Based upon the course Dr. Cottrell taught throughout his entire 49-year tenure as a seminary professor entitled "The Doctrine of God", this book is the third volume of "The Collected Writings of Jack Cottrell." For this present volume Dr. Cottrell has selected thirty studies, most of which have been produced in the twenty-first century, some as late as 2018. The first seventeen studies are grouped around the topic of the nature of God, and the next twelve studies around the works of God, especially creation and providence.

Part one of this book is a series of 10 lessons I call “Grace Distinctions”. This description comes from my 60 years of studying and teaching theology, during which I have come to think of theology as “the art of making distinctions”. I have especially found that a proper understanding of grace requires making some very important distinctions. When I was teaching grace in the seminary, I came to the point where my beginning lectures for the course were an exposition of these distinctions.

In addition to my 49 years of teaching theology at the graduate level at The Cincinnati Bible Seminary (now Cincinnati Christian University), I have spent even more years than that as a preacher and teacher in local churches. I have taught hundreds and hundreds of Bible lessons, mostly for adult Bible classes. Some of my lesson series have been topical; some have been based on Bible books. Here, for the first time, I have decided to present one of the latter series in written form for public consumption. This book of lessons is not intended to be a scholarly commentary on the text of First ...

Dr. Cottrell states in the preface, "I consider the doctrine of baptism to be one of the most important Biblical doctrines for consideration by the Christian world today. This is true not just because baptism is one of the New Covenant conditions for receiving salvation from sin, but because it is almost universally misunderstood throughout Christendom in our time. The misunderstanding of the form of baptism (i.e., immersion) began as early as the mid-second century of the Christian era, in the Christian writing known as The Didache (or, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles). The subjects of...

"My purpose for writing and publishing this material in book form is the same as for producing my two previous books of this nature, Studies in First Peter and Studies in Ephesians (both by The CRA, 2017 & 2020). As the subtitle for each of them says, “Lessons for Personal and Group Study”; and that is my intention for this volume. You can use it to deepen your own understanding of this section of the Bible, or you can use it to teach a group larger than just yourself. I am hoping you will start with the former, and then proceed to the latter. This book is especially designed as a ...

"This volume takes us to the end of the various subjects that form the full scope of systematic theology. We began with the concept of theology as such (truth, sound doctrine, bibliology), and now we have come to eschatology (the end times). In between we have covered theology proper (the doctrine of God), anthropology (the doctrines of man and sin), Christology (the person and work of Christ), pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), and ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church).So far, in the first eleven volumes of this series, I have not ...

"When I finished putting together Volume 17 of my “Collected Writings” series (preface dated April 26, 2019), I did not know if that would be the end of it or not. I had surveyed all of my older, shorter writings and selected everything I wanted to include in the series, and was satisfied to leave it at that. So where did this Volume 18 come from? Well, the fact is that every one of the essays or studies included here were written since Volume 17 was completed! Most were produced in 2020.... It is obvious that I did not set out to produce a series of essays or lessons on a single theme ...

This is Volume 2 on the general subject of salvation. Volume 1 covered mostly some essays related to salvation by grace. The preface for that volume introduces the subject as follows:When I was sorting out all the smaller writings I have produced over the decades, I was a bit surprised at how many of them fall under the subject of salvation. When measured by volume, there is almost twice as much material on this subject as on any of the other subjects. This means that there will be two volumes under the title, God’s Amazing Salvation.I guess I should not have been surprised at all, since ...

This volume contains various short essays and sermons, written and preached over the years, on what the Bible teaches about human beings. This is what systematic theology calls “anthropology,” from the Greek word anthropos, which means “man.” A systematic study of this subject covers three main areas: the nature of human beings, the problem of sin, and the problem of death. (From the Preface)

"Along the way I have also spoken much on the Holy Spirit in local churches, and occasionally written for publication short pieces on various aspects of this topic. Many of the oral presentations and most of the written pieces are included in this volume. At the very beginning is a series of talks that I was invited to give for the Michigan Christian Convention in 2012. The suggested theme was “God’s Power in You—the Holy Spirit.” You can see how I developed that theme in Section One of this book. This is the first time they have been published; study them carefully!Section Two has ...

"You will remember that Volume 1 covered the first eight chapters of Romans, and you will notice that this volume covers the last eight chapters. The dividing point between chapters eight and nine is very convenient from the publishing point of view (i.e., two fairly even volumes), but it is also logically and theologically appropriate. In a real sense, the first eight chapters of Romans could form a stand-alone theological unit. It is a wonderful essay on the essential doctrine of grace.The last eight chapters, however, could not very well stand alone. In several ways they grow out of the ...

". . . Bible doctrine can be divided into two main categories: (1) what the Bible teaches is TRUE (and false) about reality, and (2) what the Bible teaches is RIGHT (and wrong) about morality. So to be specific, Bible doctrine—i.e., Biblical teaching—includes both theology, which is what the Bible teaches is true and false about God, and about everything else in relation to God; and ethics, which is what the Bible teaches is right and wrong about things we do.Most of my teaching and writing has been devoted to the theology area of Bible doctrine. That is why almost all of the previous ...

The subject of this volume is in a sense transitional, since it lies somewhere between systematic theology and ethics. These two areas of study both belong to the more general category of Bible doctrine (“doctrine” = teaching), since they both focus specifically on what the Bible teaches. They differ in the following way, however: systematic theology (or just theology) is a study of what the Bible teaches is true (and false) in regard to the Christian world view; while ethics is a study of what the Bible teaches is right (and wrong) in regard to the Christian world view. Thus they ...

The second volume in the collection entitled "The Collected Writings of Jack Cottrell." As Dr. Cottrell explains, "these items for the most part develop themes related to the Bible, with a continuing emphasis on sound doctrine. (Sound doctrine, or TRUTH, was the theme of the first volume, The Unity of Truth.) I have divided these items into two categories. In Part One, all of the essays are dealing with the same subject, namely, the inerrancy of the Bible. For almost two decades this was one of the most controversial Biblical topics under discussion in our Movement and elsewhere. In the ...

Few if any subjects in the Bible are more important than its teachings about Jesus Christ. In my graduate studies I attended two seminaries, Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia) and Princeton Theological Seminary. In each program I had a course on Christology. In the WTS course I learned very much (more on this below), but in the PTS course the content was not very helpful for my future teaching purposes. The main reason for this difference is the vastly different view of the Bible held by each school. WTS was firmly committed to the inerrancy and authority of the Word, and PTS ...

When I was sorting out all the smaller writings I have produced over the decades, I was a bit surprised at how many of them fall under the subject of salvation. When measured by volume, there is almost twice as much material on this subject as on any of the other subjects. This means that there will be two volumes under the title, God’s Amazing Salvation.I guess I should not have been surprised at all, since salvation is probably the subject that lies closer to our hearts than the others. Also, it has been the subject of a great many of the questions that have come to me by my Facebook ...