Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I appreciate Andy Webb’s recent entry into the current discussion over baptismal efficacy. 1 This is an issue which has consumed a great deal of time and energy in the Reformed world in recent years. It is not likely to subside soon. As a contributing party to the discussion, I…
The Covenant Vision of the Heidelberg & Westminster Catechisms Regarding Children and Baptism 7 POINTS ABOUT THE TEACHING OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death? Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but…
Is the Holiday Unpresbyterian? ‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others 1 ) claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to…
This month we begin by considering Alan D. Strange’s article, “Understanding the ‘Federal Vision'” published in the February 2007 issue of New Horizons, the official denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Mr. Strange is an OPC minister, a teacher at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and was a member of the…
There is no reason to believe that Matthew 24, Mark 13, or Luke 21 records Jesus prophesying about what is now known in Christian theology as “the Second Coming.” In my opinion, the fact that most modern conservative Christian scholars and pastors are not yet willing to acknowledge that the…
Francis Turretin, the Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century, carefully distinguishes the Reformed view of infant faith from Lutheran and Anabaptist claims. Anabaptists denied any faith to infants so that they could justify their refusal to baptize them. Lutherans affirmed (rightly) that covenant infants were believers, but made no distinction…
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A remarkable statement of Calvin’s, from Institutes 4.14.18: speaking of the tree of knowledge and of the rainbow, Calvin says that these are given new being by the word of God that designates them as signs or testimonies. Then this Et antea quidem arbor erat arbor, arcus arcus; ubi inscripta…
In Nussbaum’s treatment, “tragic” and “Aristotelian” conceptions of moral luck and the fragility of the good life are at one. In excluding poets, Plato not only kept certain forms of literature at bay, but was protecting against the tragic potential of life. For Plato, “the best and most valuable things…
Nussbaum’s problematic of moral luck is quite intriguing: A good man is like a tree, she says at the beginning, quoting Pindar. But that means that the good man is dependent for his flourishing on all kinds of things beyond his control ?Erainfall, winds, sun, and so on and on.…
Should theology agree with the sophist critique of nomos ? It would seem so, as Thomas would say: The institutions of society are the product of human construction, and the claim that they are rooted in “nature” is a rhetorical device. It is human all the way down. If it…
Years ago, I read David Landes’s Prometheus Unbound for a class in economic history, and I can still remember the fascination I experienced at his descriptions of the steel industry (though details are sadly forgotten). In his recent Wealth and Poverty of Nations , Landes, among many other things, spends…
There is further evidence concerning the meaning of nomos in Greek culture, coming from Martha Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness . In a discussion of Euripides’s Hecuba , Nussbaum points out that Polyxena, Hecuba’s daughter who is offered as a human sacrifice by the Greeks to appease the shade of Achilles,…
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