Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Brief Comparison of Calvin’s Institutes with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms regarding the shape of imputation This essay is a brief argument that the soteriology of John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion regarding union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness is the same as…
The thoughts in this paper were largely prompted by a study of Walter E. Krebs, “The Word and the Sacraments,” Mercersburg Review (July, 1867), 366-383. The discussion in this paper presupposes my earlier studies of baptism, “Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future” and “Calvin on Baptism,…
Sometimes our systematic theology creates an illusion of precision. For example, we distinguish the ground and instrument of justification. Justification is grounded in Christ’s work alone, and is instrumentally received by faith alone. That makes good sense and guards us from thinking that faith itself is somehow meritorious. All the…
Whenever we participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we remember Christ and His Work for us. We remember. And in remembering, we imitate God, as His creatures made after His image. God remembers. This is mysterious to us because we usually think of remembering in the context of our…
It is standard in paedobaptist circles to argue for the baptism of infants out of the Old Covenant system. Because there is no explicit command in the New Testament, we are left to the broader principles and patterns of Scripture. In the Old Covenant, we continually find that the children…
Luther popularized the law/gospel hermeneutic. Luther argued that any demands God made upon us fell into the category of “law” and could only condemn. By contrast, anything God gave us was “gospel” and came with no strings attached. Calvin paid lip service to this law/gospel antithesis, even though it was…
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Brian Vickers taught and researched English literature at Zurich for several decades. He is an impressive literary scholar and historian who has written on Shakespeare, rhetoric, tragedy, edited Bacon and others, and produced a nice shelf full of deeply researched books. He also seems to have run out of things…
Postmillennialists like to point out that leaven doesn’t always represent evil or corruption, which is true enough. But it’s hard to avoid the fact that leaven often does represent evil. That might form some of the background to Jesus’ parable of the leaven. David Garland writes: “The parable is not…
“Sowing” is a common image in the prophets for Israel ’s return from exile. But Matthew 13:38 says that the field is not the land but the “world.” So, I think the sowing is the scattering of the seed of Israel at the time of the exile. Israel is scattered…
Typically, the parable of the tares and wheat has been understood as a description of church history. Jesus is the owner sowing the field, the devil sows tares into the church (like Judas), and for that reason the church remains a “mixed multitude” until the end of the age. The…
Athanasius again: As a musician brings out “a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God, handling the Universe as a lyre . . . produces well and fittingly, as the result, the unity of the universe and of its order, himself remaining unmoved with the Father…
Classical theology is often charged with dealing in static timeless categories, and there is no doubt something to this in some writers. But, not all by any means. In his account of sin, Athanasius says that sin has momentum because of the nature of the soul. The soul is “mobile”…
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