Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Part 1 We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture…
1. One structure The Creation account (G1:1-2:4) conspicuously conveys meaning using the literary shape of the text. The narrative is told with formulaic patterns, repetitions, and parallelism. The Garden account is different. It is viewed as a separate text, with its own author, employing its own structure. This second account’s…
I was reading James Jordan’s Creation in Six Days while also preparing for Trinity Sunday in which the gospel reading is John 3:1-15. As providence would have it Jordan dropped an easter egg for me along the lines of baptism. In chapter 5 he points out, “ On the second…
It's true. There is no verse in the New Testament that commands or records an infant baptism. This poses a problem for some Christians. Those who only look for explicit commands, or those whose theology is limited to the New Testament, will conclude that infant baptism is not biblical and…
1. Goal This paper’s goal is to identify and describe a literary strategy employed by scripture, namely using two episodes that cover similar territory or themes using details drawn from opposite ends of a number of spectrums. Once described the reader may recognize numerous other instances of this strategy in…
Numbers 14 records the tragic story of Israel’s decision to rebel against Yahweh and Moses. Twelve spies had been sent into the land to bring back a report to Israel. All twelve spies agreed: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey”…
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One of the most impressive feats of Reformation ecumenism was the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, signed by Capito, Bucer, and Musculus on the Reformed side and Luther and Melanchthon, among others, on the Lutheran side. Luther admitted that the two groups diverged on various details, but declared, in a deeply…
In his Revelation of St. John the Divine (171), GB Caird offers this bit of history to illuminate the significance of the beast from the land (Revelation 13:11-18): “In the province of Asia the imperial cult was in the hands of a body known in Greek as the koinon and…
Scott Manetsch’s Calvin’s Company of Pastors is a rich contribution to the history of pastoral theology and care in the Reformation era. If you want a detailed, vivid portrait of the training and selection of Geneva’s pastors, their weekly schedules, the liturgies they performed and the resources they had available…
America is abandoning the last remnants of our historic Christian foundations. This is most obvious in law, where specifically Christian claims are ruled unConstitutional precisely because they are Christian claims. It’s evident in the universities and among intellectual elites, who cannot make sense of a theological argument that claims to…
It was a well-nigh universal trope of Reformation rhetoric that the Reformers were the catholics who had to defend orthodoxy and catholicity against the sectarianism of the Roman church. Luther disputed the Catholic claim that obedience to Rome was the definition of catholicity, and disputed it on the basis of…
William Perkins is known mainly among Reformed Christians with an affinity for the Puritans. It’s refreshing to have now W.B. Patterson’s substantial monograph on Perkins’s life and theology, published last year by Oxford. After setting the stage with a chapter on the Elizabethan religious settlement, Patterson examines Perkins as “apologist…
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