At one o’clock on Friday, June 23, 2000, a vast company of people filled Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. They had come from all over the world to honor the memory of Dr. James Montgomery Boice, pastor of the church for more than thirty years. The keynote of the service was heartfelt thanksgiving to God for such a remarkably fruitful life and ministry.

Eight weeks previously, the church was also crowded—for the opening service of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology (PCRT). During that conference, Dr. Boice shared with me the medical report he had received on Good Friday: He was suffering from cancer of the liver and the prognosis was very bad. He was planning to tell the congregation the following Sunday. This he did, with astonishing calmness, courage, and selflessness. Many said it was the most moving occasion they had ever shared in.

From his earliest days, Jim Boice was a leader among men. He distinguished himself at Harvard University, Princeton Seminary, and the University of Basel in Switzerland. His academic ability and scholarly nature were to become the foundation for a life dedicated to preaching, teaching, and defending the gospel.

His passion for reformed theology led him to found the PCRT in 1974. Similarly his concern for the Reformation principle of “sola Scriptura” lay behind his crucial influence in planning and convening the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, from 1978 to 1988. In 1996 he was instrumental in forming the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Yet I do not think he would wish to be remembered mainly for these landmark conferences and their widespread influence. More than once he said to seminary students, to whom he frequently spoke, “I am first and foremost the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church. That’s where my heart is.”

Consistent with this, he spent more than thirty years as Tenth’s senior minister, to its eternal benefit. Early in his ministry he wrote of the Puritans, “They were steeped in the Word of God. They were diligent. No work was too great or mountain too high for them to tackle. They were pious men who spent long hours in study and on their knees. They were not looking for promotion to positions of greater and greater prominence. Rather, they were willing to stay in one place, so the work of bringing the Word fully to that place might be completed.”

Theologically and personally, James Boice was himself in that true Puritan tradition. No man I have known has more fully than he exhibited and expounded in his life and ministry the five “solas” of which he writes in this book. They were the foundation stones of his thinking and the substance of his preaching.

Writing in these pages of the sufficiency of Christ for the believer, he says, “We need no other prophets to reveal God’s word or will. We need no other priests to mediate God’s salvation and blessing. We need no other kings to control the thinking and lives of believers. Jesus is everything to us and for us in the gospel.”

So it was in Jim Boice’s life. The more you got to know him, the more apparent that became. Quite simply, he lived to know Christ better; he lived to preach Christ more effectively; and he lived to exalt Christ with every faculty of his being.

His death brings great gain to him but great loss to the Christian church. Many of us miss him acutely, but we thank God that through such books as the one you now hold in your hand, and by many other means, “he, being dead, yet speaks.”

Soli Deo gloria.

Eric Alexander
St. Andrews, Scotland

We don’t like to admit it, but anyone who honestly evaluates the church's life and outlook will understand that these are not good days for evangelicalism. Yes, we've achieved success, but in a worldly sort of way—big numbers, big budgets, and big outreaches. Yet church attendance is actually down and alleged “born again believers” do not differ significantly in their worldview from their neighbors. Why? We have forgotten our theology and, consciously or not, have pursued the wisdom of the world, accepted its “doctrines,” and utilized its methods.

Pastor James Montgomery Boice believed that our ignorance of God and neglect of the gospel of grace is the root of the problem. Here he identifies what’s happening within the church and explains how the five doctrinal truths that transformed the world during the Reformation not only offer the solution but can shape a renewal today.

By offering people what they so desperately lack—the Word of God and salvation through Christ—rather than giving them an imitation of what they already have, we will see Christianity thrive once again. And in holding fervently to the foundational truths of the gospel, we will know the power of renewal in our churches.

Above Material Copyright © 2006 Crossway Books