Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I have never heard anyone say that the Bible is impractical, but I have heard people, after an in depth exegesis of a passage, ask for the practical application. Offer a class on childrearing, marriage, finance and the church members flock to it; offer a course on Leviticus, the visions…
Stones External and Internal The modern practice of dismantling the Bible into a shambles of documents authored in response to disparate historical events rather than viewing it as a unified testimony inspired by God is a surefire way to miss what is actually going on in the text. This failure…
King Asa of Judah made a strong start, purging the land of idols, altars, and images, and winning a war against the ginormous Cushite army led by Zerach. It all unraveled in his final years. From his thirty-fifth year to the forty-first year, when his reign came to an end,…
What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. It's can serve as a summary of Paul's letter to the Romans, and throws some important light on the themes of that letter. Paul begins his sermon with a quick…
Iago as Tempter The answer to our first question — whether or not Othello is really great tragedy — has already pointed the way to the answer for the second question — Was Othello a noble Moor or a fool? The two questions, of course, are necessarily related. The fall…
When Adam McIntosh was ordained as Pastor of Saint David’s Church (CREC) in Houston on June 11, 2017, it was the culmination of decades of preparation. Adam is the product of two continents and three Christian traditions. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, he lived his early years partly in Jericho, where…
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In this morning?s sermon, we will be looking at the role of the Spirit in the incarnation of Jesus, in the redemption achieved by Christ, and in the life of the Trinity. One way to summarize the point is that the Spirit is the divine bond, the ?glue?Eof the Trinity.…
Vander Zee shows some chutzpah in addressing the question of Eucharistic sacrifice, and in suggesting that there are senses in which the Eucharist is properly said to be sacrificial. He offers a few quotations to show the Reformation pedigree of this perspective. The first from Calvin: “The Lord’s Supper cannot…
Leonard J. Vander Zee’s Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is the most satisfying introduction to sacramental theology that I’ve come across. VanderZee works out a Reformed understanding of sacraments in general (focusing on the fact that sacraments are God’s action - hardly a Reformed monopoly, of course), as well…
Oswald Bayer says that for Luther faith is “divine work in us,” and that means for Luther that God “slays the old nature that belongs to the old world, the old Adam, and makes us new creatures, a new creation.” This is, in Bayers’ summary, the “decisive aspect of the…
White in fact does not even cover all the passages concerning justification within the texts that teach the doctrine. Romans 6:7 is absent from his Scripture index, and he lists the “key Pauline passages” that deal with justification as Romans 3-5; 8:29-34; Gal 1-5 ( The God Who Justifies ,…
Near the heart of the Protestant doctrine of justification (as Barth saw) is the insistence that God, not man, is Judge. Efforts at self-justification are NOT merely moralistic efforts to recommend ourselves to God (though they are that). Efforts at self-justification are also (perhaps more fundamentally) assaults on God’s Lordship;…
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