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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John Pinheiro's Missionaries of Republicanism is, according to the subtitle, a “religious history of the Mexican-American War.” He shows how the war was infused with religious themes, linking American Protestantism with Anglo-Saxonism and Manifest Destiny. Near the heart of the religious justification of the war was anti-Catholicism: The United States…
John condemns harlot Babylon for her luxury. The Greek word is strenos , which is used only once in the LXX, to describe the “complacency” of Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:28). The Hebrew term behind it is sha'anan , which describe the women of Jerusalem (Isaiah 32:9, 11), those who are…
In a contribution to the 1988 volume, Eliminating Racism , Thomas Pettigrew explained the uniqueness of the African-American experience, which “uniquely combines a long history of being simultaneously an integral part and on the outside of the society” (23). Few of even the most racist Americans consider blacks to be…
When Israel was deported to Babylonian exile, it would have been natural for Israelites to reason that they ought to limit the size of their families and wait for a return to the land. It might even be best to avoid marriage/ After all, who wants to support a wife…
Since Ferdinant Toennies introduced the categories, sociologists have often contrasted the gemeinschaftlich forms of social life in traditional societies with the gesellschaftlich forms in modernity. As Nancy Ammerman explains the distinction, the former are marked by “affectivity, particularism, ascription, and diffuseness. In such communities, relationships had emotional depth, were idiosyncratic,…
Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots is an attempt to trace the roots of Heidegger's affinity for Naziism. The “roots” of the title have a double meaning - both the intellectual background to Heidegger and Heidegger's formulation of Bodenstandigkeit , “rootedness.” Early on, Bambach summarizes Ernst Bloch's “caustic and penetrating” response to…
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