Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Brief Comparison of Calvin’s Institutes with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms regarding the shape of imputation This essay is a brief argument that the soteriology of John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion regarding union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness is the same as…
The thoughts in this paper were largely prompted by a study of Walter E. Krebs, “The Word and the Sacraments,” Mercersburg Review (July, 1867), 366-383. The discussion in this paper presupposes my earlier studies of baptism, “Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future” and “Calvin on Baptism,…
Sometimes our systematic theology creates an illusion of precision. For example, we distinguish the ground and instrument of justification. Justification is grounded in Christ’s work alone, and is instrumentally received by faith alone. That makes good sense and guards us from thinking that faith itself is somehow meritorious. All the…
Whenever we participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we remember Christ and His Work for us. We remember. And in remembering, we imitate God, as His creatures made after His image. God remembers. This is mysterious to us because we usually think of remembering in the context of our…
It is standard in paedobaptist circles to argue for the baptism of infants out of the Old Covenant system. Because there is no explicit command in the New Testament, we are left to the broader principles and patterns of Scripture. In the Old Covenant, we continually find that the children…
Luther popularized the law/gospel hermeneutic. Luther argued that any demands God made upon us fell into the category of “law” and could only condemn. By contrast, anything God gave us was “gospel” and came with no strings attached. Calvin paid lip service to this law/gospel antithesis, even though it was…
Showing page 232 of 309
Showing page 3 of 43
For those interested in Reformed political thought, Bill Chellis of De Regno Christi has organized an online discussion of Darryl Hart’s recent book, A Secular Faith . You can find the discussion at a new address: http://deregnochristi.org/2007/03/19/throwing-down-the-gauntlet.
For those interested in Reformed political thought, Bill Chellis of De Regno Christi has organized an online discussion of Darryl Hart’s recent book, A Secular Faith . You can find the discussion at a new address: http://deregnochristi.org/2007/03/19/throwing-down-the-gauntlet.
Muir again: “In [medieval] England taking communion was called ‘taking one’s rights,’ which meant asserting one’s membership in the community, and to suffer excommunication . . . would have meant exclusion from both the universal community of believers and the local community of citizens . . . . Although the…
In the second edition of his book on ritual in the early modern period (Cambridge 2005), Edward Muir describes the 14th and 15th century obsession with “Christ’s carnality”: “As Leo Steinberg has shown, in fifteenth-century Italy thoroughly Christian artists made visual allusions to Christ’s phallus, showing that the god-man had…
INTRODUCTION Last week, we looked at parents’ responsibility to guard the “inside” of the family from dangerous influences from “outside.” But the family also has a positive relation to the world outside. A healthy family is open in proper ways toward the outside, and is supposed to affect the world…
Psalm 128: How blessed is everyone who fears the LORD, who walks in His ways. When you shall eat of the fruit of your hands, you will be happy and it will be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house, your children like…
Showing page 1704 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
