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Biblical Studies

Abraham Myth: A Response to Peter Enns

It took a parody. I devoted a section of a chapter in Deep Exegesis to Peter Enns's work, I've critiqued him on my blog here and here and here , as well as the similar work of John Walton, here and here . To my knowledge, neither Enns nor Walton…

by Peter LeithartJuly 14, 2015
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Capitalism

Before Obergefell: Some Thoughts on How We Got Here

The establishment of same-sex marriage is not a bolt from the blue, but the logical outworking of a series of related developments in America’s practice and understanding of marriage. Same-sex marriage was unthinkable just a few decades ago. What made it thinkable wasn’t a concerted campaign on the part of…

by Alastair RobertsJuly 10, 2015
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American Culture

American Tragedy: Gird Up Your Loins

Unless Obergefell can be reversed soon through the next two presidential elections and the retirement/replacement of renegade SCOTUS judges (Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer are the first up), this will turn out to be the greatest American tragedy for the civil liberties of persons of faith, for the cause of sexual…

by Robert GagnonJuly 10, 2015
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Homosexuality

Lightning from East to West

With same sex marriage now legalized in many Western countries, and militant Islam ravaging the East, Christians might be wondering what God is doing. With the repeated failure of predictions of an imminent second coming, is the Bible any help to us at all in predicting what will happen next?…

by Mike BullJuly 9, 2015
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Children

Who Is My Neighbor?

When I was expecting my first child, an older woman gave me the best nugget of parenting wisdom that I have. She told me to always remember that my child is my sister-in-Christ before she is my daughter. I have clung to these words in so many situations as I…

by Lindsey TollefsonJuly 9, 2015
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Homosexuality

After Obergefell: Ephraim Radner

Male-female distinctions define marriage in a particular direction: the gift of generation and of generations. With its decision, the Supreme Court of the United States has done its part to deny and destroy this reality, and further the modern process of legalizing child abandonment, while at the same time violating…

by Ephraim RadnerJuly 8, 2015

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Seal of Baptism

In an 1873 article in the Mercersburg Review, E.V. Gerhart, a professor at Mercersburg seminary, argued that nineteenth-century views of baptism had departed radically from the viewpoint of the Protestant confessions: “Claiming to be the faithful representative of Reformational ideas, the religious press of our day, generally at least, denies,…

February 28, 2014

Renewed in Baptism

E.V. Gerhart argues in his 1873 Mercersburg Review article that the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that “Baptism makes the sinner a new man.” He explains: “The word ‘renewed’ in this connection . . . is to be taken as affirming a new organic relation of the subject of Baptism with Christ,…

February 28, 2014

Historicism’s Dilemmas

At the beginning of her The Philosophical Question of Christ , Caitlin Smith Gilson sketches the multiple dilemmas of historicism. Historicism “takes the historicist out of history,” which is not only paradoxical but, on historicist terms, impossible, since outside history “there is no place to be” (xiii). How does this…

February 28, 2014

Pity the Subversive

Frank Kermode summarizes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental novel, In the Labyrinth , in his The Sense of an Ending : “the soldier who is the central figure only slowly emerges (in so far as he does emerge) from other things, the objects described with equal objectivity, such as the mysterious packet…

February 27, 2014

Voluntary Impurity

In a contribution to Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law , Leslie Cook helpfully traces the differentiations of Leviticus back to the divisions of creation. In the creation accounts, God is differentiated from human beings and human beings from nature by “body, blood, food, time, and space”…

February 27, 2014

Bringing up the Cud

To be accounted clean, land animals have to “chew the cud.” The Hebrew for “chew” is alah , to bring up or to ascend. That’s quite literal. Animals that chew the cud swallow, and then regurgitate the food back to the mouth to chew. By the time we get to…

February 27, 2014

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