Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The 2002 Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference and the Assurance of Grace Recently, there has been some controversy over the presentations of four speakers at the Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference. Accusations have been made including a denial of justification by faith alone and something close enough to “baptismal regeneration” that it…
Today, many in the Reformed world view a meritorious covenant of works as essential to a proper understanding of the gospel. These theologians believe that God set up a program in the Garden by which Adam would merit eternal life and blessing by his obedience. These same theologians usually regard…
After I graduated from college in 1989, I spent a summer in the Atlanta area in Georgia learning that I was not cut out for construction work. Then I met George Grant, one of my favorite authors. He was working for a church in South Florida in charge of their…
One meaning of “righteousness” in the Bible is moral uprightness. Perhaps a more basic meaning would be faithfulness. For example, Psalm 96.13 praises God, saying: He will judge the world in righteousness, And the peoples in faithfulness. In Hebrew poetry two lines often say the same thing using different words.…
I once saw “eschatology” defined as the study of edible French snails. But it really means the doctrine of the last things in Christian theology. In American Evangelical culture it is usually reduced to science fiction stories. But for the Apostle Paul it was actually the key to the Christian…
To understand the view of Nicholas Thomas Wright regarding Christ’s work of redemption, one must begin with the centrality of Adam to the plight of the human race. Anyone who has heard Wright’s lectures on Philippians will not be able to forget his haunting appeal to Genesis 5.3 as a…
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T he book of Acts ends with a sailor's yarn. Paul has appealed to Caesar, and is sailing toward Italy when the ship hits a squall. Luke gives a detailed account of the efforts to save the ship and the final shipwreck at Malta, during which all 276 people on…
I n her essay in Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine , Mary Doak unpacks some features of a Trinitarian, communion-oriented political theology. She doesn't, however, think that communio ecclesiology implies pacificism, and, as a feminist theologian, she worries that communio can be used to blunt the force of…
D an Piepenbring comments briefly in The Paris Review on a bizarre fashion trend of the eighteenth century: “During Marie Antoinette’s time, for instance, there was a brief craze for caca-dauphin , a shade of brown that resembled the color of the new prince Louis-Joseph’s soiled diapers. In the most…
R eflecting on the retirement of actor Daniel Day-Lewis at Variety , Owen Gleiberman suggests that “What retired . . . is something that’s waning in the culture: the belief in acting as a highly sculpted soul transplant—as the mystical spirit of inhabitation.” He fills out the point by situating…
M y son Woelke sent this along, from Louis Menand: The real basis for the metaphor of voice in writing is not speaking. It is singing. You cannot know a singer from her speech, and although ‘natural phrasing' and ‘from the heart' are prized attributes of song, actually singing that…
I n the course of reviewing Philippe Desan's Montaigne: A Life , Jane Kramer speculates on the fraught question of Montaigne's influence on Shakespeare. Such influence is historically plausible: “Although Florio’s 1603 effort was the first English rendering of Montaigne’s essays to appear in book form, they had certainly been…
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