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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Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 56-7) observes that Plato dealt with mythology not be eliminating the gods but by taking their mythical histories as metaphor of the real, “by reading the elevating density of the intelligible in the heaviness of the sensible.” Platonic dualism thus…
Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 59) observes that for Paul “Time [is] the expression or explication . . . of the eternal.” He elaborates by linking predestination with the imperative of creation to sketch out a linguistic/constructivist ontology: “Word and seed correspond to each other…
“Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” says Paul. Most interpretations focus on the objects: Jews are defined by signs, Greeks by wisdom. Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 143-4) is more interested in the verbs: “We have here a simple typology, limited to an…
The oath of the strong angel in Revelation 10 knits together two passages. The angel’s oath stance - hand raised - alludes back to Ezekiel 20, where Yahweh reminds Israel of the day He chose them and lifted His hand (Heb. ‘esse ’ yadi ), making Himself known to them…
John records Jesus’ ringing “It is finished” in his crucifixion narrative. But when he gets to Revelation, John records another declaration that things are “finished.” The angel who gives John the book to eat swears that “the mystery of God is finished” (Revelation 10:7). In context, the mystery of God…
In a NYRB review of an exhibition of Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Julian Bell links the early cubist experiments of Georges Braque to the impressionism of Cezanna: “In his artistic researches, Cézanne had been intent to paw at the boundary between his personal visual sensations and the…
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