Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World As I mentioned above, the history of Israel involved several centuries as a church-without-a-culture, and then several centuries as a culture-without-a-city. To be sure, there was an informal culture around the church of the Patriarchs, but the civilization of free farmers…
In the Reformation Tradition we baptize both professing believers and their children. In the case of infants it is now commonly insisted that this is done because the children are already in covenant with God. Baptism is a sign and seal of a previously existing reality. Despite the popularity of…
Concerning Sex & the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf of bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato, virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the mumbo-jumbo and — presto! — the sacraments confer…
In 27.2, the Westminster Confession says that because of the “spiritual relation” between sacraments and the things they represent, “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” Applied to baptism, this means that when the Bible says that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6), it…
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Galileo Goes To Jail , a 2009 collection of essays edited by Ronald Numbers, examines 25 myths of science and religion. The essays aren't defenses of religion by any means; they instead aim at complicating the received scientific triumphalism and set records straight. Maurice A. Finocchiaro tackles myth #8, that…
The late Billy Graham from a 1 959 issue of Christianity Today . 1959!! One of the pet words of this age is "tolerance." It is a good word, but we have tried to stretch it over too great an area of life. We have applied it too often where…
"Modernity," writes Jason A. Josephson-Storm, "is first and foremost the sign of a rupture . . . a device for positing significant historical breaks" ( The Myth of Disenchantment , 7). By designating something as "modern," we associate it with novelty, up-to-dateness, "the current." But modernity is also a spatial…
Frances Young ( God's Presence , 173-4) offers this summary of the post-Nicene consensus concerning the image of God in man: "Athanasius and the Cappadocians, those who fashioned the notion of theopoiesis / theosis and recognized that it implied Nicene orthodoxy, were those who had a sense of the interrelationship…
Everyone wonders - children, “savages,” men and women at one another. Philosophers wonder too, Rosenzweig says ( Understanding the Sick and the Healthy ), but they respond to wonder differently from the rest of us. The rest of us are “adrift on the river Life, borne on, wonderment and all.”…
Sociologists, Rosenstock-Huessy charges, often formulate their theories in this fashion: "an obscure Force A and a Relation B . . . affect Mr Y." Sociologists "pretend that their science address a nameless world" ( In the Cross of Reality , 4). No such nameless world exists: "X and Y are…
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