Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
While I think Zacharias Ursinus’ thinking would be profitable to consider, I am not recording his reflections in order for readers to come to agreement with his position as a whole. Rather, my interest is twofold. First, I think the way the Heidelberg Catechisms is used as a “proof” of…
On this question Hebrews 10 is quite clear and really needs no additional argument. For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume…
Not all readers of this essay letter may be aware of it, but a tempest has been brewing in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a tempest created by the liberal party in that denomination. It came about this way. In January 2002, a Pastor’s Conference on covenant theology was…
Once upon a time there was such a thing as Calvinistic thought. It existed when I was younger, but seems to have largely disappeared in recent years. But let me elaborate. When I became a Calvinist, back in 1970, I bought a bunch of books. Over the next few years,…
CHRIST THE PREACHER How Ephesians Shows Us Why Preaching is Essential to Salvation & Sanctification Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a…
Tracking the informal shifts in Protestant opinion regarding Baptism can be a difficult business. For example, in 1849 Anglican clergyman William Goode published his defense of Evangelicalism against the Anglo-Catholics under the title, The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the Effects of Baptism in the Case of…
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In an 1873 article in the Mercersburg Review, E.V. Gerhart, a professor at Mercersburg seminary, argued that nineteenth-century views of baptism had departed radically from the viewpoint of the Protestant confessions: “Claiming to be the faithful representative of Reformational ideas, the religious press of our day, generally at least, denies,…
E.V. Gerhart argues in his 1873 Mercersburg Review article that the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that “Baptism makes the sinner a new man.” He explains: “The word ‘renewed’ in this connection . . . is to be taken as affirming a new organic relation of the subject of Baptism with Christ,…
At the beginning of her The Philosophical Question of Christ , Caitlin Smith Gilson sketches the multiple dilemmas of historicism. Historicism “takes the historicist out of history,” which is not only paradoxical but, on historicist terms, impossible, since outside history “there is no place to be” (xiii). How does this…
Frank Kermode summarizes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental novel, In the Labyrinth , in his The Sense of an Ending : “the soldier who is the central figure only slowly emerges (in so far as he does emerge) from other things, the objects described with equal objectivity, such as the mysterious packet…
In a contribution to Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law , Leslie Cook helpfully traces the differentiations of Leviticus back to the divisions of creation. In the creation accounts, God is differentiated from human beings and human beings from nature by “body, blood, food, time, and space”…
To be accounted clean, land animals have to “chew the cud.” The Hebrew for “chew” is alah , to bring up or to ascend. That’s quite literal. Animals that chew the cud swallow, and then regurgitate the food back to the mouth to chew. By the time we get to…
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