Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World As I mentioned above, the history of Israel involved several centuries as a church-without-a-culture, and then several centuries as a culture-without-a-city. To be sure, there was an informal culture around the church of the Patriarchs, but the civilization of free farmers…
In the Reformation Tradition we baptize both professing believers and their children. In the case of infants it is now commonly insisted that this is done because the children are already in covenant with God. Baptism is a sign and seal of a previously existing reality. Despite the popularity of…
Concerning Sex & the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf of bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato, virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the mumbo-jumbo and — presto! — the sacraments confer…
In 27.2, the Westminster Confession says that because of the “spiritual relation” between sacraments and the things they represent, “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” Applied to baptism, this means that when the Bible says that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6), it…
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“Atheism may have turned a corner,” writes Tom Roston at Quartz . He’s referring to Sam Harris’s latest, Waking Up , subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.” It’s got Harris quoting Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century: “One day, you will find yourself outside this world which…
When John enters heaven, he sees several things “before the throne”: seven lamps that are the seven Spirits, a sea of glass like crystal, eventually a pile of discarded crowns (Revelation 4:5, 6, 10). Elders sit on thrones around the throne (4:4). He doesn’t see any altar. He also doesn’t…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
No one is justified by the works of law, Paul says, and supports the claim with what appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 143:2. The Psalm says “for not righteous before your face are all the living.” Paul writes, “by the works of the law no flesh is justified”…
If God knows all that is going to happen, can I be free? Saying “No” creates considerable difficulties about our understanding of human nature. But if we insist on human freedom in such a way that excludes God’s foreknowledge, we face equally considerable difficulties, this time about God’s nature. Ryan…
Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future may be difficult to grasp, but it falls into place when we realize that the scope of his ontology was “reality as a whole.” That may seem to add diffuseness to the vagueness of the original concept, but the two large…
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