While Rutherford published most of his works in English, he also wrote three substantial books in Latin, which have never been translated into English. The excerpts translated from Latin below are selected from Rutherford’s Examen Arminianismi (An Examination of Arminianism). This book contains Rutherford’s lecture notes on systematic theology while serving as professor at St. Andrews. As the title indicates, and as the material below demonstrates, the book targets the Arminians as his chief opponents. Though published in the Netherlands after Rutherford’s death, it reflects the early development of Rutherford’s thought.
No one who has taken the Bible seriously and who knows it to be the inspired Word of God can believe the world to have begun with a Big Bang. Attempts are made to profess faith in the Big Bang, as an event which can be believed along with the biblical account of creation in Genesis. “Why can we not believe both the Genesis account and the Big Bang to be true?” it is asked.
The Reformed have historically identified three marks of the visible Church: first, the preaching of the true Apostolic doctrine of the Gospel; second, the administration of the two sacraments appointed by Christ; third, the Biblical government and discipline of the Church. Church members are under its discipline, but a related area of confusion concerns how baptized members, who have not yet communed at the Lord’s table, stand in relation to Church discipline. How should a Kirk Session deal with a baptized member who has grown up in the Church but fallen into sin and turned their back on the means of grace and pastoral care?
The Lord’s day was appointed to be an earnest and sign of our everlasting rest, the rest that remains for the people of God. It is intended to remind us of heaven, to fit us for heaven, and to give some comfortable pledges and foretastes of the joys and glories of that blessed state, to all those who have their conversation in heaven, and their affections set upon things above. These are the days of heaven; and if heaven be an everlasting sabbath, surely sabbaths are a heaven upon earth, in them the tabernacle of God is with men.
