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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I have commented in the past on the bizarre Eucharistic imagery that ends Isaiah 49: “And I will feed your oppressors with their own flesh, And they will become drunk with their own blood as with sweet wine; And all flesh will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior,…
Throughout the 40s of Isaiah, Yahweh promises to do something unprecedented, something new, for Israel. He will bring them from bondage - but he’s done that before. This time, he will bring them back by using Gentiles as agents of Israel’s liberation. That’s a new thing, better than the Exodus,…
Linda Colley doesn’t think that the United Kingdom can remain united. In Acts of Union and Disunion , she following Benedict Anderson’s lead in claiming that nations are Imagined Communities , formed from myths and, as Colley says, “an attractive idea of what they are.” As summed up by the…
In his TLS review of Andrew Sanders’s In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past , AN Wilson suggests that Dickens was representative of his age in his “open hatred of the post, and his perky lower-middle-class joy in nowadays.” Not all Victorians shared Dickens’s progressivism: “Ruskin deplored Dickens’s…
A sketch of a Jensonian critique of historical criticism of Scripture: The Bible must be understood in its historical context. In practice, this means that the Bible’s historical claims are relativized to the discoveries of ancient historical investigation, archaeology, etc. If the bricks and pottery shards say that Jericho didn’t…
The book of Genesis is neatly divided into sections by toledoth statements: “These are the generations of” or some variation. The phrase means “these are the things generated by” so and so, and the things generated are often children. But there is a variation within the book between genealogies and…
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