Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
While I think Zacharias Ursinus’ thinking would be profitable to consider, I am not recording his reflections in order for readers to come to agreement with his position as a whole. Rather, my interest is twofold. First, I think the way the Heidelberg Catechisms is used as a “proof” of…
On this question Hebrews 10 is quite clear and really needs no additional argument. For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume…
Not all readers of this essay letter may be aware of it, but a tempest has been brewing in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a tempest created by the liberal party in that denomination. It came about this way. In January 2002, a Pastor’s Conference on covenant theology was…
Once upon a time there was such a thing as Calvinistic thought. It existed when I was younger, but seems to have largely disappeared in recent years. But let me elaborate. When I became a Calvinist, back in 1970, I bought a bunch of books. Over the next few years,…
CHRIST THE PREACHER How Ephesians Shows Us Why Preaching is Essential to Salvation & Sanctification Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a…
Tracking the informal shifts in Protestant opinion regarding Baptism can be a difficult business. For example, in 1849 Anglican clergyman William Goode published his defense of Evangelicalism against the Anglo-Catholics under the title, The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the Effects of Baptism in the Case of…
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Athanasius insists that the Father must have an eternal Son because the Father’s essence could never have been imperfect: “if He is called the eternal offspring of the Father, He is rightly so called. For never was the essence of the Father imperfect ( ateles ), that what is proper to it should…
From Richard Wilbur’s “Lying”: In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light: Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof, Then grass and grackles or, at the…
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Perhaps the most obvious and easiest resolution of the conundrums that Augustine explores is a perichoretic one. Does the Father have wisdom “in Himself”? Yes, because the Wisdom that is the Son dwells in Him  by the Spirit.  Does the Father possess His being “in Himself”?  Yes, because the Son…
1 Corinthians 1:24 says that Christ is the power and wisdom of God.  Augustine spends two books of de Trinitate trying to figure out what that means.  In Book 6, he tries out the notion that the Father’s power and wisdom is simply the power and wisdom that He begets…
Augustine argues ( de Trinitate 5.1.6) that claims about human beins are spoken either secundum substantiam or secundum accidens .  The latter category includes relational terms, statements about us ad aliquid , with reference to another.  That is, for humans, in contrast to God, relational terms are accidents, changeable.  God…
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