Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Book Review The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation & Evangelism by Norman Shepherd The Call of Grace is an excellent manual to put in the hands of laymen to teach them how to rest in God’s grace while taking seriously the prize of the upward call of…
My Role as a Parent in My Children’s Salvation Evangeline Jael Horne is our third child. My two boys were born while we were at seminary and we had the privilege of giving them to Jeff Meyers, our pastor at that time, for baptism. When Evangeline was born, however, I…
John Calvin writes in the Institutes about the possibility of admitting children to the Lord’s Supper by virtue of their baptism once and only once: At length they object, that there is not greater reason for admitting infants to baptism than to the Lord’s Supper, to which, however, they are…
The debate over paedocommunion does not seem to have made much headway on either side in recent years. Certainly both sides have made a solid effort to argue for their position. But no resolution seems to be forthcoming in the near future. As a convinced paedocommunionist, I find the church’s…
Lots of conservative Protestants want to answer “no” to this question. The problem with this position is that conservative Protestants are bound to believe what the Bible teaches. And the Bible says inconvenient things, like “baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3.21), or “all of you who were baptized into…
This paper is something of a follow-up to my earlier study, “ Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future .” One of the more controversial aspects of that paper was my claim that Calvin held to a very high view of baptismal efficacy. Indeed, he was a…
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In the time of the New Testament, Judea was a multi-lingual region. Aramaic was the common speech among Jews; but most had at least a smattering of Greek, could hear Latin spoken all over Jerusalem, not to mention Hebrew in certain settings. Linguistically, first-century Palestine was far more like Switzerland…
Curtius also has an excursus on numerical composition in the patristic and medieval period. 33 was a favorite structuring device - Augustine’s Contra Faustum has 33 sections, as does Cassiodorus’s Institutione . Verse in 33 stanzas was popular, and “Nicholas of Cusa provided in his will that 33 old men…
Why would Barr, Saussure, and others think that speakers and writers have only the present meaning of a word in mind? Does it perhaps have something to do with the fact that they have only the present sense in mind? As the previous post showed, this is hardly a universal…
We’re consistently told by contemporary commentators and theorists of hermeneutics that etymologies ought not be used in biblical studies. One text says that it is “always dangerous” to interpret etymologically. There are at least two reasons for this: 1) Word meanings change, and so the original or historical meaning of…
INTRODUCTION This section of Proverbs departs from the two-line structure used through much of the book. Instead, these proverbs run to at least two, sometimes several verses. Verses 17-21, for instance, constitute a single section. Verse 18 is connected to verse 17 by the particle “for,” so that verse 18…
The English delegation to Dort didn’t want the Synod to condemn the view that reprobates can be regenerated and justified for a time, only to lose those benefits. The English delegation was successful; this was not among the errors rejected by the Synod. That is itself a remarkable fact, but…
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