Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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The medieval arguments in favor of the notion of preparation for justification through created grace are founded on anthropological and cosmological claims. McGrath summarizes the Summa Fratris Alexandri , which he calls “the first systematic discussion of the nature of created grace,” as follows: “The Holy Spirit can be said…
Here is a hypothesis or suspicion, not a conclusion, much less a conviction: The notion that God rewards what we do with what we have, and the notion that we are purely passive in salvation are not, as they appear, extreme opposites, but are two positions within the same framework.…
Charles Hodge doesn’t quite get to justification as deliverdict here, but he comes close: “[Paul] had just said that the believer cannot continue to serve sin. He here [in 6:7] gives the reason: for he who has died (with Christ) is justified, and therefore free from sin, free from its…
Strict justice, Aquinas argued, is only possible between equals, and since God and man are not equals there is never strict justice in God’s dealings with us. Further, God being God, He is never put in debt to His creatures, never obligated to give anything, unless by His own prior…
According to Calvin, only in a qualified sense. McGrath says, “The later Franciscan school, the via moderna and the schola Augustiniana moderna regarded the ratio meriti as lying in the divine good pleasure; nothing was meritorious unless God chose to accept it as such. This teaching was extended to include…
I have been greatly helped here by Cynthia Nielsen’s online summaries of Marion’s book. 1) One of Marion’s main ambitions is to move beyond the Western concern with being with its concomitant focus on the “object.” In place of “objectness,” a static notion of the things of the world, Marion…
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