Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Study in Biblical and Practical Theology Sunday School Notes / Epiphany 2004 Introductory Note: January 6 is Epiphany in the traditional church calendar. Though Epiphany is often treated as a single day, with the Sundays following counted as “Sundays after Epiphany,” we will treat Epiphany as an extended season.…
Imagine someone from another world trying to learn to live in our society according to our customs. What if someone gave him a check for a hundred dollars for his birthday–the first check he had ever seen in his life? Would he immediately understand how a check was used? Perhaps…
According to Presbyterian doctrine, as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, baptism is a baptized person’s “admission… into the visible church.” By referring to the “visible church,” the document makes clear it is referring to the present institutional Church with all her imperfections, as opposed to the future Church…
N. T. Wright claims that in the Apostle Paul’s writings “righteousness,” as it predicated of humans, denotes “covenant membership.” When he wrote this in the New Bible Dictionary edited by Sinclair Ferguson, J. I. Packer, and David Wright, no one thought this was too big a deal. However, when he…
It seems almost human nature to think that we can find something to do for God that will make Him do us favors. If we live more virtuously, or cut down on a vice or two, then God will have to reward us. But the problem with this notion is…
The First Commandment teaches us to trust in Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life. The First Commandment reads (I’m using NASB throughout): “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Obviously, trusting in someone or something else (even one’s own good works) for justification, sanctification, and eternal life”…
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Several times, Revelation identifies God triadically, triunely as the one “who is and who was and who comes” (1:4, 8; 4:8). He is the present God, the God who reaches back beyond the origins of all things - the God of whom it could always be said “He is” -…
In the introduction to his recent Prophetic Lament , Soong-Chan Rah summarizes studies that show that “lament is often missing from the narrative of the American church” (21). One study “found that in the Lutheran Book of Worship , the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer , the Catholic Lectionary for…
Ron Highland's The Faithful Creator is “sustained argument with evangelical open theism, liberal process theism and other models of creation and providence that deny that God accomplishes his good will in all things.” All such paradigms, he argues, fail ‘to take God's transcendence seriously enough, thinking that God cannot relate…
Ron Highland argues ( The Faithful Creator ) that discussions of providence and freedom often get off on the wrong foot because of a faulty definition of freedom. “Many recent discussions of freedom give the impression that the Bible speaks directly and often about a freedom of the will given…
The exalted martyrs sing “the song ( ode ) of Moses the slave of God and the song of the Lamb” (Revelation 15:3). That could mean that the martyrs sing the song about or even composed by Moses and the Lamb. It could also mean that they sing a song…
In an address to Congress in 1826, Charleston's Catholic bishop John England declares his allegiance, and the allegiance of his church, to the American polity: “I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church, outside the Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at…
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