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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Poor Joseph, we say. He’s on the margins of every Christmas story, every depiction in art, every medieval dramatic rendition. Leave it to Barth to find theological significance in Joseph’s marginality: Speaking of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Barth says that “The male has nothing to do with this birth.…
You know the scene in the movie: The hero, finding that he can no longer resort to half-measures and fighting through intermediaries, decides he must take things into his own hands, and challenges the villain in hand-to-hand combat. That is incarnation.
David Martin’s Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding has some good moments. The big problem first: He seems to assume that sacred and secular are divided by a given (though fluid) boundary, and thus argues that Christianity must “adjust to” and “compromise with” the languages and mores…
When I see books with titles like Ideas That Changed the World I have one main reaction: Suspicion. That suspicion increases when the book is filled with splashy photos and sidebars full of soundbite-sized analysis. In the hands of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Millennium and an acclaimed history of food,…
At 23, James Frey had already been a drunk for over a decade, was addicted to crack, wanted in several states, subject to fits of violent Fury, a battered mess. Without knowing how, he ended up in a rehab center in Minnesota. A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003) is the…
David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite looks to be one of those books to savor, read, reread, mark, and inwardly digest. I’ve only read a bit of it, but it’s as masterful as his articles. (Stylisically, the book is by turns moving and maddening; I’ve never seen anyone…
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