Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“And it shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land,” declares the Lord, “they shall say no more, ‘The Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.’ And it shall not come to mind, nor shall they remember it, nor shall they miss it, nor…
Elsewhere, I have argued that there is grace in the so-called covenant of works (see, e.g., my colloquium essay, “A Response to ‘The Biblical Plan of Salvation,’” in The Auburn Avenue Theology: Pros and Cons , edited by Calvin Beisner (pages 118-148). It may be equally surprising to find justice…
Years ago, as a layman, I had the privilege of attending a Bible study led by a gifted teacher. His story was interesting: back when he was a student he had been severely sanctioned for affirming that one must repent in order to be saved, that one must trust Jesus…
Believing that God really exists Defining “faith” is sometimes made too complicated. The theologian, Louis Berkhof, for example, distinguishes “faith in general” from “faith in the religious sense and particularly saving faith.” Berkhof’s core definition of saving faith is not so bad. He says that it is “a certain conviction,…
It is generally acknowledged that when Paul wrote letters to churches, he expected his letters to be read in the worship service to the congregation. It is interesting, then, that when Paul wrote letters to a congregation he could feel free to address children and tell them to obey their…
Book 4 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is a classic work of ecclesiology. This book is the longest section of the Institutes , showing Calvin’s deep interest in and love for the church. Among its many salutary features is a full scale exposition of those ecclesiastical leaders Calvin…
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Much of the following wedding sermon was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s recent Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places . I read from the first chapter of John’s First Epistle. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at…
Bones are the last part of a person to decay, and so in Scripture they are often used to designate the person in a state of death or a continuing existence after death (cf. Joseph’s bones). The bones of a nation are the remnant that are left after a nation’s…
Eugene Peterson’s latest book, the first of a five-volume spiritual theology, takes its title from some lovely lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
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