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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One of Kant’s central contributions to philosophy was the invention of the notion of “critical philosophy,” which means epistemology, which means philosophy as a critique of knowledge. Philosophy is the queen of the sciences that polices the borders between sciences and keeps everyone safely in his or her own department.…
Paul D. Janz offers a favorable interpretation of Kantian epistemology in his God, the Mind’s Desire . Janz begins with an assessment of Kant’s project in the first Critique. It is, he points out, a Critique of Pure Reason , not a defense, yet in spite of this title and…
What is the problem Kant is trying to solve? Near at hand, there are a host of problems: He wants to respond to Hume’s skepticism; he struggles with the problem of evil; he wants to affirm the advances of Newton without sacrificing humanity and religion. But if we look in…
What is the problem Kant is trying to solve? Near at hand, there are a host of problems: He wants to respond to Hume’s skepticism; he struggles with the problem of evil; he wants to affirm the advances of Newton without sacrificing humanity and religion. But if we look in…
Kant is often accused of bringing an end to metaphysics. He didn’t think so: “Metaphysics, with which it is my fate to be in love, although only rarely can I boast of any favours from her, offers two advantages. The first is that it serves to solve the tasks which…
Nancey Murphy summarizes Kant’s argument that the cosmological argument reduces to the ontological in this way: “Suppose we can argue to the necessary existence of some x by showing that its existence is a necessary condition for the existence of all that we know to exist. How, then, to identify…
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