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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Following John McWhorter, I wrote recently about the religion of Antiracism . Tara Isabella Burton calls it the religion of social justice. We're talking about much the same thing, a novel religion that is a shadow form of Christian orthodoxy. "Social justice is a religion," she writes in Strange Rites…
Exodus 28 is organized outside-in, first describing the visible, exterior portions of the high priest's robes and then the hidden or partially hidden underclothes. There's also a movement upward, from torso to head. The passage is crowned with a description of Aaron's golden crown. The crown is called a tziytz…
When will the tumult die down and things get back to 2019-era normal? Maybe never. A pandemic that might have united the United States has divided us further. Demonstrations sparked by a real abuse of power have driven some policemen from the streets. While everyone was looking the other way,…
There are at least two sorts of hopeless Christians these days. One sort despairs as they survey America's history of abuse of blacks, the evils and hypocrisies of slavery and Jim Crow, the terror of lynchings and bombings and the Klan, the church's appalling racist theology. Will America ever find…
Yahweh's design for Aaron's robes in Exodus 28 moves from outside in, from the ephod and attached breastpiece (28:6-30) to the robe beneath the ephod (28:31-35) to the tunic (28:39) and underwear breeches (28:42-43). Verses 36-38 interrupt the movement with a description of the high priest's head gear. Otherwise, the…
Aaron’s breastpiece ( chosen ) is woven of gold, colored wool thread, and linen, square like. the Holy of Holies (Exodus 28:15). It’s a span in length and a span in width, folded double to form a pouch (Exodus 28:16), and attached to the ephod by gold rings and chains…
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