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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Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage,…
God cannot deny Himself and is unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. He never contradicts Himself or becomes other than the faithful God that He is. And yet: Our God is shown to be God above all in becoming man; our Creator is shown to…
Lacan, stressing how language controls us, says “I am not a poet, but a poem.” I don’t know about Lacan, but that is certainly the case for Christians: “For we are His workmanship (Gr. poema ), created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10).
The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or…
In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd , David Reisman divided humanity into three parts: the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The last were distinguished from the first by the fact that they looked to the present rather than to the past for direction: “What is common to all…
Is solitide a prerequisite for the rise of individualism? If someone is never actually alone, can he ever conceive of himself as being defined in isolation and separation from others? This line of questioning might give some part of the explanation for the rise of individualism in the modern world.…
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