Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Book Review The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation & Evangelism by Norman Shepherd The Call of Grace is an excellent manual to put in the hands of laymen to teach them how to rest in God’s grace while taking seriously the prize of the upward call of…
My Role as a Parent in My Children’s Salvation Evangeline Jael Horne is our third child. My two boys were born while we were at seminary and we had the privilege of giving them to Jeff Meyers, our pastor at that time, for baptism. When Evangeline was born, however, I…
John Calvin writes in the Institutes about the possibility of admitting children to the Lord’s Supper by virtue of their baptism once and only once: At length they object, that there is not greater reason for admitting infants to baptism than to the Lord’s Supper, to which, however, they are…
The debate over paedocommunion does not seem to have made much headway on either side in recent years. Certainly both sides have made a solid effort to argue for their position. But no resolution seems to be forthcoming in the near future. As a convinced paedocommunionist, I find the church’s…
Lots of conservative Protestants want to answer “no” to this question. The problem with this position is that conservative Protestants are bound to believe what the Bible teaches. And the Bible says inconvenient things, like “baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3.21), or “all of you who were baptized into…
This paper is something of a follow-up to my earlier study, “ Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future .” One of the more controversial aspects of that paper was my claim that Calvin held to a very high view of baptismal efficacy. Indeed, he was a…
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After listing 22 descriptive terms for the self (including stressed, self-alienated, paranoid, bulimic), Kenneth Gergen notes that “they are all terms of mental deficit. They discredit the individual, drawing attention to problems, shortcomings, or incapacities. To put it more broadly, the vocabulary of human deficit has undergone enormous expansion within…
Montaigne wrote in his essay on the education of children, “The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the remainder is due to action. Let us, therefore, employ that short time…
Postmodernity is from one angle modernity coming to self-consciousness. Managerialism is as much at the heart of modernity as of postmodernity, but postmoderns know they are being managed. As a result, management is always shot through with irony. How can we take the wizard seriously after the curtain has been…
David Lyon’s little book, Postmodernity, provides an excellent introduction to the sociological, technological, and political contexts in which postmodern thought has arisen. He is cautious about inflating claims about a “postmodern” condition or the coming of a “new society,” but attempts to isolate those features of contemporary life that have…
INTRODUCTION As many critics have pointed out, Act 2 of Hamlet focuses on the efforts of both the “mighty opposites” - Hamlet and Claudius - to spy out the intentions and plans of the other. Thus begins the process of inserting various mediators between the two, all of whom end…
Rikki Watts offers some other dimensions to the quotation from Mark 1:1. He notes that Mark is quoting not only from Isaiah 40, but also from Exodus 23 and Malachi 3, and shows how these three texts overlay each other in Mark’s presentation. Exodus 23 is a warning to Israel…
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