Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When someone expounds the way of salvation found in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms and in the easily-accessible writings of the Reformed heritage, he often finds him embroiled in a debates about the covenant of works and the Mosaic Covenant. One is “proven” to be aberrant by allegations that one…
The ultimate condemnation of a position in Reformed circles is to show that it “leads back to Rome.” Indeed, one gets the feeling that Rome is a worse destination for a Presbyterian than even hell itself. The accusation of Rome stings deeply, of course, because it means that all the…
One of the odd features of Michael Horton’s version of Covenant theology is his interpretation of the covenant God made with Abraham 1 in Genesis 15. According to Horton, The very way in which God made the covenant with Abraham (putting him to sleep; walking through the torn animals by…
What was I trying to do, when I wrote my book on Mark’s Gospel ? Fundamentally, I wanted a book that would change readers by making them better readers of the Gospel of Mark. My ideal reader is not someone who goes to the book to use as a resource…
Why do we need sacraments? According to the Westminster Confession, sacraments were instituted by Christ “to confirm our interest in him” (27.1), “to strengthen and increase” the “faith” of those within the Covenant of Grace and “to distinguish them from those that are without” that covenant (Westminster Larger Catechism, #162).…
In Isaiah 5:1-7, we have a typical covenant lawsuit, in which the Lord accuses his people of rejecting his grace and mercy. It is not my intention here to exegete the entire passage, or to look at the way the vineyard image used here serves as a metaphor in other…
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According to Pickstock, Augustine’s musical ontology is not a mere subordination of space to time, or a univocal “Dionysian flow”: “just as important as the priority of time, for Augustine, is the insistence on articulation into distinct musical units or phrases, the very move which allows a stress upon the simultaneity…
Nothing comes from nothing.  That seems obvious, and Christians have traditionally had some difficulty explaining why creatio ex nihilo is a defensible violation of that basic principle. According to Catherine Pickstock, Augustine viewed creation ex nihilo as the most rational position.  All around us, “things are continuously coming to be…
In responding to Milbank’s analysis of Augustine on the secular, RA Markus ( Christianity And the Secular (Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology and Culture) ) borrows MJ Hollerich’s summary of Milbank that there is no “neutral public sphere in which people can act politically without reference to…
Jean-Marie Schaeffer ( Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (New French Thought Series) has a blast pointing out the contradictions in Kant’s aesthetics. Most of them arise from Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is founded on “the form of a finality” that…
Can effects double as causes? Kant, still working with some form of final causality, thinks so: There are cases when “the thing that for the moment is designated effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it…
Evidence that Hamann had Kant right: In explaining taste as a common sense, he notes that this common sense of beauty can be arrived at by a process of stripping off whatever belongs to our perception and prejudice. That is, we put “ourselves in the position of every one else,…
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