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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Coronavirus

Does Corona Compassion Kill?

The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 26, 2020
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Theology

Is Theology Useless?

“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…

by Alexander WhitakerMay 19, 2020
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How to Worship

How Should Churches Respond to One Another?

Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…

by Jonah BarnesMay 12, 2020
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Fear

Fear

Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…

by Bogumil JarmulakMay 5, 2020
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Heresy

The Blessing of “Heresies”

In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…

by Ralph Allan SmithApril 30, 2020
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Fear

On Coping (or not) with a Crisis

I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…

by Matthew MasonApril 28, 2020

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Calvin and the fourfold

On the Psalms, Calvin wrote: “although David speak of himself in this Psalme: yit he speaketh not as a common person, but as one that beareth the person of Christ, bicause he was the universall pattern of the whole Churche: and the same is a thing worth the marking, too…

April 10, 2008

Totus Christus

Samuel Mather wrote that “types relate not only to the Person of Christ; but to his Benefits, and to all Gospel Truths and Mysteries, even to all New Testament Dispensations.” To speak of “types of Christ” is thus not merely to speak of types fulfilled in Jesus, but types that…

April 10, 2008

Single sense

William Perkins on the one sense of Scripture, referring specifically to Galatians 4: “There is but one full and intire sense of every place of scripture, and that is also the literal sense . . . . To make many senses of scripture is to overturn all sense, and to…

April 10, 2008
History

Ren and Ref

Lewalski’s book makes clear just how much the Reformation owed to the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, among many other things, rhetoric’s reaction to centuries of dialetical hegemony, and Lewalski shows in great detail that in England at least Protestant fully shared the Renaissance obsession with rhetoric.

April 10, 2008

Puritan sacramental hermeneutics

William Perkins on figures of speech: “There is a certaine agreement and proportion of the externall things with the internall, and of the actions of one with the actions of the other: wherby it commeth to passe, that the signes, as it were certaine visible words incurring into the externall…

April 10, 2008

Typology and history

I have found Thomas’s explanation of the quadriga convincing. He argues that the multiple spiritual senses are not “located” in the words but in the things that the words name. One might say that for Thomas the words have a single, namely literal, sense; but the things they name are…

April 10, 2008

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