Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Brief Comparison of Calvin’s Institutes with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms regarding the shape of imputation This essay is a brief argument that the soteriology of John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion regarding union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness is the same as…
The thoughts in this paper were largely prompted by a study of Walter E. Krebs, “The Word and the Sacraments,” Mercersburg Review (July, 1867), 366-383. The discussion in this paper presupposes my earlier studies of baptism, “Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future” and “Calvin on Baptism,…
Sometimes our systematic theology creates an illusion of precision. For example, we distinguish the ground and instrument of justification. Justification is grounded in Christ’s work alone, and is instrumentally received by faith alone. That makes good sense and guards us from thinking that faith itself is somehow meritorious. All the…
Whenever we participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we remember Christ and His Work for us. We remember. And in remembering, we imitate God, as His creatures made after His image. God remembers. This is mysterious to us because we usually think of remembering in the context of our…
It is standard in paedobaptist circles to argue for the baptism of infants out of the Old Covenant system. Because there is no explicit command in the New Testament, we are left to the broader principles and patterns of Scripture. In the Old Covenant, we continually find that the children…
Luther popularized the law/gospel hermeneutic. Luther argued that any demands God made upon us fell into the category of “law” and could only condemn. By contrast, anything God gave us was “gospel” and came with no strings attached. Calvin paid lip service to this law/gospel antithesis, even though it was…
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Seizing power doesn't make a revolution. When you seize speech, then you've got a chance at total revolution. Writing of the French Revolution, James Billington writes ( Fire in the Minds of Men , 34-5), " four-letter outbursts of the youthful demonstrators in the late 196os echoed the political shock…
You could find anything in the cafes of the Palais Royal in the last decades of the eighteenth century: "Distinctions of rank were obliterated, and men were free to exercise sexual as well as political freedom. In the course of a single visit, one might sip such libations of liberation…
Toward the end of Corpus Mysticum , Henri de Lubac says that one of the most serious results of the shifts in Eucharistic theology he examines is "the devaluation of symbols." Augustine's entire theology was about "signs" and "things." In the late Middle Ages, "consideration of 'signs' would soon suffer…
"In the summer of 1789, absolute monarchy and aristocratic authority were overthrown forever in the most powerful kingdom," writes James Billington in Fire in the Minds of Men (20). If something happens, it must be possible. Just so: The French Revolution was "the hard fact that gave birth to the…
Josiah's death is a reverse exodus because it's first an inverted Passover. Zechariah describes a scene of mourning like the “mourning on the plain of Megiddo,” a reference to the death of Josiah (Zechariah 12:11). But the mourning Zechariah describes is also like the mourning of Egypt over their firstborn.…
Was the American Revolution a Revolution? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ERH) concludes it was a “half-revolution” rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions. Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on the question of what “revolution” meant to the…
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