Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Rounding Out the Traditional Doctrine of Justification Justification and the Church The traditional Protestant doctrine of justification fails to fully hold together the soteriological (forgiveness of sins) and the ecclesiological (covenant membership). This is part of a larger problem, of course, namely, the dichotomizing of church and salvation. Biblically and…
John Piper’s book, Counted Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002) is, from any perspective, a passionate work. Nevertheless, I find I need to disagree with parts of it. The reason I do this is not because John Piper’s book does…
What follows is a handout for a Sunday School class I have taught recently at my church . Presbyterian doctrine teaches what the Bible says about God sovereign control over history and his unconditional choice (election) to bring some people to everlasting glory while allowing others to remain in unbelief…
“Covenantal Nomism” sounds like a description of tiny contract-loving creatures who live underground. But it is actually a recent term used to describe the pattern of religious belief and practice in first-century Palestinian Judaism. The idea is that God graciously establishes a structured relationship based on promises, a “covenant,” with…
What follows deals primarily with two essays, one by Dr. Douglas Kelly and the other by The Rev. Richard Phillips . My reason for writing this essay is that many people are confidently saying things about N. T. Wright that I believe are contrary to fact. I choose Dr. Kelly…
The Bible is often treated as a book of rules with directions for living. To some extent, that is true; but it is neither the whole truth nor the most important truth about the book. Ultimately, the Bible is a story about God and man and their reconciliation in Christ.…
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Ibsen, Steiner argues, did not write tragedies. Ibsen wrote “dramatic rhetoric” calling society to reform. For real tragedy, there is no such “solution” to be found, there is no remedy, except destructive sacrifice and perhaps a deus ex machina. From this angle, tragedy is perhaps among the STOICHEIA that prepared…
Some more quotations from Steiner’s Death of Tragedy : “We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama . . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. And…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former “closed” and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a neo-classicist) at some length, concluding that the controversies that Rymer…
George Steiner in his Death of Tragedy describes the “Shakespearean difference” as mainly due to Shakespeare’s avoidance of fascination with Hellenic models: “The neo-classic view [which rigidified Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy] expresses a growing perception of the miracle of Greek drama. This perception was fragmentary. There were few translations of…
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