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…
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Featherstone: “one of the characteristics of postmodern art in the 1960s was its attack on institutionalized art: on the museums and galleries, the critical academic hierarchies of taste, and the consecration of works of art as clearly demarcated objects of display. This attack on autonomous, institutionalized art was itself not…
Charles Jencks lamented in his Language of Postmodern Architecture that the term had been used in ways opposite to his own usage: “When I first wrote the book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only been used with any frequency in literary criticism. Most perturbing,…
Featherstone again: “Postmodernism effectively thrusts aesthetic questions toward the center of sociological theory: it offers aesthetic models and justifications for the reading and critique of texts (the pleasure of the text, intertextuality, writerly texts) and aesthetic models for life (the expressive aestheticization of life, art as the good of life).”
Featherstone wisely notes the danger of “simply relabelling experiences as postmodern which were formerly granted little significance,” and laments that many definitions of postmodernism are too loose and vague to be useful. Yet, even if contemporary thinkers are simply re-packaging established patterns of social and cultural life, it is worth…
The Modernday Dictionary of Deceived Ideas offers this definition of postmodernism “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.” Mike Featherstone, who quotes this dictionary, offers a more serious discussion of what postmodernism means when applied to artistic movemements. He gives this summary of the sensibility of…
INTRODUCTION Waltke proposes the following structure for chapter 13. 13:1 is an introductory verse that picks up on the exhortations of the prologue to listen to the father’s instruction. There is a multiple inclusion around the chapter. The “discipline” of v. 1 is taken up in v. 24, and the…
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