Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Reformers did not start out with a plan to found separated churches. Their goal was to reform the entire Latin church. In this they failed. The paradox is sharp, and we need to feel its point and its edge if we Protestants are to reckon honestly with our history…
Conversion is a turning from sin to Christ. Now, let's think about that. Does conversion happen only once in a lifetime, or does it happen many times? That is the question, I believe, that needs answering. From my experience, and from my understanding of the Bible and of Christianity, there…
Israel was supposed to be a priest to the nations (Ex. 19:6). Her water would cause their trees to grow. This was signified to all men when Israel came out of Egypt, for "then they came to Elim, where they were twelve springs of water and seventy date palms, and…
Rousing Soviet songs surround us as we pass through a gloomy gauntlet of titanic statues on our way to Kyiv’s Museum of the Great Patriotic War. My friends, a Polish and a Ukrainian pastor, remember the songs, which played incessantly on the radio during their childhood. The sculpture complex depicts…
This is the second installment of a two-part article. Click HERE to read Part I. The fourth perspective on ceremony is that of the action of the Lord's Supper. As we noted before, the inauguration of the Lord's Supper preceded its interpretation. Jesus did not at that point give an…
The best courses are those that make you see the Bible, the church, or the world differently. The recent Theopolis Architecture Course with Daniel Lee did exactly that. Architect Daniel Lee began the week with architectural theory, continued through the week taking students through a history of architectural practice, and…
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O wen Chadwick devotes a chapter of The Reformation to “the decline of ecclesiastical power.” He reviews the effects of the Reformation on excommunication, the benefit of clergy, church property and the power of the local parish church. Sanctuary was one of the medieval institutions ended by the Reformation. Sanctuary…
D iarmaid MacCulloch ( Reformation: Europe's House Divided ) calls attention to the effect of Psalm-singing, spurred on by Beza's publication of a French Psalter in 1562–3: The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the…
D iarmaid MacCulloch ( Reformation: Europe's House Divided ) points to the “bizarre fortunes” of the Bremen Cathedral to illustrate the “stand-off and ill-will between the two Protestantisms,” Lutheran and Reformed: With its crucial position in the north-west of the German lands, [Bremen] had once been the very heart of…
B rad Gregory ( Unintended Reformation , 130-2) argues that, despite their obvious differences, modern states that allow free religious expression, confessional states, and totalitarian states that suppress religion have a common root. Both assume that the state determines the limits of allowable religion on its own, an assumption that…
Z echariah thought utopia is a place where there are games in the streets: “the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets” (Zechariah 8:5). Anthony Esolen agrees ( Out of the Ashes , 164-5), because the fact that children play in the…
D ouglas Murray reports at The Spectator on the ongoing and largely ignored persecution of Christian villages in Nigeria: “These tribal-led villages, each with their own ‘paramount ruler,' were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians — from the bishop down — sense that…
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