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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W hat is the Spirit’s role in justification—the justification of Jesus and of sinners? In Protestant theology, the Spirit is typically on the “subjective” side of justification. By awakening faith, the Spirit enables sinners to receive the justifying verdict of the Father who imputes the righteousness of the Son to…
My grandson screams and runs away from a butterfly, flutterflower, wings fine as petals. The butterfly, gentlest creature, flies on, perhaps abashed, perhaps, feeling manly for having made a child cry, to pick a fight with a Monarch.
A ccording to Romans 6:7, justification is God's liberating judgment that delivers the baptized from sin, death, and from the reign of injustice. By baptism, one is transferred from the realm of Adam to that of the Last Adam. As the latter half of Romans 6 teaches, the life of…
T he closer we look at “modernity,” argue Jean and John Comaroff in Modernity and Its Malcontents , the more “rapidly [it] melts into air” (xii, riffing on Marx). This is partly because there are always, and have always been, “many modernities” (xi). Modernity “becomes especially vague when dislodged from…
J ehovah's Witnesses refuse to salute the American flag. In the case of Minersville School District v. Gibitis (1940), the Supreme Court rejected the Witness argument that being forced to salute the flag was comparable to the Nazi demand that Germans acknowledge Hitler. Felix Frankfurther dismissed the analogy: “It mocks…
M aurice Glasman ( Unnecessary Suffering , 35–36) observe that the phrase “Christian Democracy” first appeared during the 1848 Paris uprising. From Lamennais, the Christian Democrats argued for democracy as a product of Christian teaching. Democracy provided a framework for negotiating competing interests in society and for the protection of…
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