Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I appreciate Andy Webb’s recent entry into the current discussion over baptismal efficacy. 1 This is an issue which has consumed a great deal of time and energy in the Reformed world in recent years. It is not likely to subside soon. As a contributing party to the discussion, I…
The Covenant Vision of the Heidelberg & Westminster Catechisms Regarding Children and Baptism 7 POINTS ABOUT THE TEACHING OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death? Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but…
Is the Holiday Unpresbyterian? ‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others 1 ) claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to…
This month we begin by considering Alan D. Strange’s article, “Understanding the ‘Federal Vision'” published in the February 2007 issue of New Horizons, the official denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Mr. Strange is an OPC minister, a teacher at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and was a member of the…
There is no reason to believe that Matthew 24, Mark 13, or Luke 21 records Jesus prophesying about what is now known in Christian theology as “the Second Coming.” In my opinion, the fact that most modern conservative Christian scholars and pastors are not yet willing to acknowledge that the…
Francis Turretin, the Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century, carefully distinguishes the Reformed view of infant faith from Lutheran and Anabaptist claims. Anabaptists denied any faith to infants so that they could justify their refusal to baptize them. Lutherans affirmed (rightly) that covenant infants were believers, but made no distinction…
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Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible . In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving - rather than ‘resolving’ - [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” That tension is inherent in realism’s…
Duncan Kelly argues in his lengthy TLS review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the “book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality.” That is not simply about the anti-democratic role that wealth plays…
Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath As Resistance is, like most of Brueggemann’s other work, bracing and frustrating in equal measure. He rightly sees the Sabbath command in connection with the first commandment: Worshiping the God of the exodus means worshiping a God who delivers from the demanding, restless gods of Egypt and…
Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the…
“Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War,” writes Howard French in China’s Second Continent , “Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.” That Africa is rich in…
Socrates’s discussion of purity in the Sophist treats the concept in a refined fashion. He admits the existence of bodily impurities, but his focus is on the mental impurities that need to be cleansed if someone is to escape the evils of ignorance and error. Benjamin Jowett provides this summary…
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