Editorial

Dear friends,

Welcome to another issue of Jubilee! As you may have heard, we have begun a return to the earlier form and purpose of this journal, which is to provide a resource to help Christians think Christianly about every area of life. The mission and vision of the Ezra Institute remains the advancement of the lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life and culture, and that includes our thought life. With that in mind, we have not hesitated to tackle complex and controversial topics in an in-depth way, and to present it in a hard-copy format that readers can revisit, mark up, and otherwise interact with. Jubilee is distributed to subscribers and ministry partners, and we’re grateful for your support as we progress through this year.

NEWS UPDATES

We are very excited to announce that the Ezra Learning Portal is coming online at the end of this summer! If you’ve been engaging with the Ezra Institute for any length of time, you may remember that at the end of 2021 we began work on this new online learning portal; some of you helped us by testing the beta version of that platform and providing feedback to help us improve it. This coursebased learning platform is intended to solve several problems that we’ve identified.

First, we’ve noticed that interest in our in-person training programs has been growing, while at the same time the ability to travel globally has been dramatically restricted. Those same restrictions have also made it harder for us to accept invitation to participate in other ministries’ events and programs. We’ve also heard from many Christians who, for several reasons, are seeking alternatives to mainstream, formally accredited Bible colleges and seminaries. We’ve sought to respond with a solution that provides faithful teaching and lasting value. The Ezra Learning Portal is:

Paid: charging a small subscription fee enables us to commit more time and resources to continually add to and improve the portal.

Professionally produced: Christians should do all our work with excellence, and that extends to video production and web development.

Custom-designed: We did it the hard way with a proprietary, built-from-scratch platform. This took longer, but it allows us more control over the final product, and it makes it harder for the cancel-culture mob to deplatform us.

Mobile-friendly: It functions like an app, but it doesn’t need to go through app store approvals.

The Ezra Learning Portal is designed for students who find themselves unable to attend traditional classroom settings, Christians schools and churches providing congregational education, and a general audience who are seeking in-depth instruction from a known and trusted source. We hope that this new project is a blessing to God’s people. You can learn more about it by visiting www.ezralearningportal.com.

MINISTRY EXPANSION

In the previous issue we announced that the Ezra Institute is expanding our work to the UK and USA. Dr. Joe Boot is returning to the UK this summer to lead the establishment of that office. He will be in Canada regularly to participate in all our training programs and conferences, and will continue to work closely with the Canadian and American staff in every aspect of the ministry on a weekly basis. The Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Jubilee journal, and publishing work will continue in its present form, as well as pursuing relevant expansion opportunities within our unique sphere. Thank you for your ongoing prayers and support during this time of transition.

PODCAST FOR CULTURAL REFORMATION

We continue to be encouraged by the number of people who reach out to us to let us know how they have been blessed by the Podcast for Cultural Reformation. This show started to reach a broad audience with the message of the gospel and its application to every square inch of life and culture. God has graciously amplified our audience so that we are reaching 20,000-50,000 listeners each month, which places this show in the top 1% of podcasts globally. You can catch us on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and most other podcast platforms. And of course, you can always listen directly on the website, www.ezrainstitute.com. Beginning this fall for Season 6, we’re also looking forward to launching a brand new video component to the show.

TRAINING PROGRAMS

As of this writing we have just concluded another summer of programs. This year we welcomed 24 delegates to the Runner Academy in Golden, British Columbia, and 36 students to the Worldview Youth Academy in Port Colborne, Ontario. We praise God for sending us another wonderful group of delegates – sincere, thoughtful, and energetic young people from a range of backgrounds. Recordings of these sessions will be posted on the Ezra Learning Portal.

The opportunity to meet, study, and have fellowship with likeminded Christians from around the world is truly a blessing that we never want to take for granted, and as we expand our ministry presence, we look forward to offering more training programs in more locations in 2023.

Still to come this year is our first general-audience training program, the Christianity and Culture Colloquium. This three-day course is for Christians from all backgrounds and stages of life who are interested in understanding how to apply God’s Word to our present cultural moment. Lord willing, we intend to offer this program October 18-21 in southern Ontario. If you would like to attend, please contact us at info@ezrainstitute.com, or check our website, www.ezrainstitute.com.

RESOURCES

We are continually working to provide faithful, engaging, and timely resources through our publishing wing, Ezra Press. So far this year we have released Joe Boot’s newest book, Ruler of Kings, distributed in partnership with Wilberforce Publications. In this book, Joe seeks to provide the foundation for a distinctly Christian response to our current socio-political crisis.

We are also preparing a new edition of A Time to Search, to be released at the end of the summer. This 20th anniversary edition of Joe Boot’s classic apologetics work was published in North America

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as Searching for Truth. Joe explains how the biblical worldview makes sense of the whole of reality, wrestling with questions common to the human experience about suffering, truth, morality, guilt, and the claims of the person of Jesus.

Finally (so far), Joe contributed a chapter to a volume produced by Ezra Institute Fellow Andrew Sandlin, entitled Failed Church: Restoring a Vision of Ecclesial Victory. This collection aims to assess the present state of the church, and deals with topics as diverse as prayer, economics, authoritarianism, environmentalism, and eschatology.

These and many other books are available at www.

ezrapress.ca.

IN THIS ISSUE

It’s our privilege to bring you two new articles this issue, as well as a book review. Ezra Institute Founder Joe Boot has written on the relationship of reformational philosophy to Scholasticism, explaining how the Christian gospel and the person and work of Jesus did not neatly fit with the assumptions and ideological commitments of the Greco-Roman context where they were introduced. This is part of the reason why Paul describes the preaching of a crucified and risen Christ as “foolishness to the Greeks.” Joe expands on the uncomfortable relationship between Christian thought and Scholastic dualism that persisted for several centuries, culminating in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and which endures in various forms in present-day Christianity. It required a comprehensive Christian world and life view to effect a break from dualism, and this was found in the reformational tradition.

Dr. Brad Green introduces the key thinkers and ideas of Critical Theory, explaining how CT is a religious system of thought, complete with doctrines of creation, sin, redemption, and eschatology. Significantly, he notes how Critical Theory is ultimately not critical enough with regard to both the problems and solutions confronting mankind.

Ezra Institute Fellow Tim Dieppe has contributed a review of a recent work of scholarship in the field of textual criticism.

Thank you for your continued support. We are encouraged to know that you are praying for the work of the ministry as we seek to vindicate the gospel of Jesus Christ over all of life. We trust you will be blessed and challenged by the material in these pages, and we would be delighted to hear your feedback.

For Christ and His Kingdom,

Ryan Eras

DIRECTOR OF CONTENT & PUBLISHING

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