Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. Hebrews 10:34 There is an old Puritan dictum that goes, “Sit lightly on the world.” George MacDonald places it…
As Genesis unfolds, God chooses a line of promise out of the nations. One by one its offshoots are peeled away as the story zooms in on God’s chosen people, Israel. First, the line of Cain is peeled away as Cain is sent out from the presence of YHWH. Though…
The following article was an address given to Anselm Presbytery (CREC) in the Fall 2024. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Pray with me. Father of Heavenly Lights and fount of all Wisdom, guide us we pray, by your Word and Spirit,…
At my age, I’ve given up on the fantasy of “keeping up.” Much of my reading is now narrowly focused, research-reading in service of writing projects. If you want bibliography on the ontology of artifacts in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (which you don’t), or the purity laws of Leviticus, or…
I have been reading, thinking, and writing about the Internet and its effects upon our identities, communities, polities, and discourses for nearly a copy of decades. In that time, I have encountered no book as perceptive on the subject as Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature…
Identifying the men Paul refers to as “enemies of the cross” in Philippians 3:18 turns out to be relatively difficult. Peter O’Brian speaks of “all kinds of suggestions regarding their identity,” and offers a list of interpretations: “moral libertinists, behavioural materialists, orthodox Jews, lapsed or apostate Christians—because of persecution, Jewish…
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When it’s all said and done, Rahner multiplies levels of nature and the supernatural. There is the purely conceptual “pure nature,” which has never existed in reality but must be possible if we are to think grace as grace. There are actually existing natures, the concrete reality of created beings.…
Some thoughts on Book 19 of Augustine’s City of God, mostly taken from an article by Oliver O’Donovan (the revised version of the essay published in O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection). O’Donovan points out that the the issues in this book are broadly moral rather than specifically political. It…
In the opening pages of his Theology After Wittgenstein , Fergus Kerr, O.P., mounts a Wittgensteinian critique of Rahner’s epistemology, which, he concludes, is thoroughly indebted to Cartestian philosophy. Due to the influence of Cartesian categories, Kerr sees Rahner’s theology determined by “an extremely mentalist-individualist epistemology” that contributes to a…
One of Dabney’s answers to the charge that imputation is unjust is tat “God forbids imputation of capital guilt by human magistrates,” but “He customarily claims the exercise of it in His own government.” The difference he explains by saying “Human magistrates are themselves under law, in common with those…
Several students have observed the parallels between Peter’s denial in John 18 and the denial of Jesus by the Jews in chapter 19. Peter denies three times, in a pattern of 1 + 2; so do the Jews. Between then, contrasting to these denials, is Pilate’s threefold confession of Jesus’…
Dabney thinks that Calvinists have offered “unsatisfactory” answers to objections to its doctrine of definite atonement. Two sorts of objections in particular: “From the universal offer of atonement through Christ, and from Scripture.” He answers these objections, and then goes on into a detailed discussion of the “relation of limited…
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