26 articles
Protestants have always insisted that the sacraments bring no benefit without a response of faith, but this seems to undermine infant baptism, since infants do not appear to be able to exercise faith. Luther and Calvin held together their insistence on faith with infant baptism by claiming that infants can…
Traditional Presbyterian theologians regularly cite 1 Corinthians 11:28 as an argument against the practice of paedocommunion. Children must be able “to examine themselves” before they come to the table. Supposedly this text demands a certain level of intellectual capability as well as the capacity to engage in self-conscious introspection, both…
As I noted in an earlier article in Rite Reasons , the Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine all claimed that baptism inducts the baptized person into membership in the royal priesthood of the church, and Thomas Aquinas said that baptism, by imprinting an indelible “character” on the soul, confers…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
G. K. Chesterton began Orthodoxy by describing the plot of a book that he had never written. Taking a page from Chesterton, below I will briefly map out the territory of a book (or books) that need(s) to be written. Had I but world enough and time–and a small army…
“What art thou, thou idol ceremony?” asked Henry V during his midnight rounds of the English camp near Agincourt. His answer was that ceremony was both nothing and everything. It was nothing in the sense that it offered no guarantee that the king would be fit for office. Contrary to…
The Hebrew word translated as "grain offering" or "cereal offering" is minchah . Like the translation of `olah as "burnt offering," the translation of minchah as "grain offering" is somewhat deceiving, since minchah does not refer to grain or cereal. In liturgical contexts outside of Leviticus, in fact, the word…
"He shall then skin the burnt offering and cut it into its pieces" (Leviticus 1:6). The normal word ( `olah ) that is translated as "burnt offering" and "whole burnt offering" has nothing to do with either burning or wholeness. It is the noun form of a verb meaning "to…
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