Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When someone expounds the way of salvation found in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms and in the easily-accessible writings of the Reformed heritage, he often finds him embroiled in a debates about the covenant of works and the Mosaic Covenant. One is “proven” to be aberrant by allegations that one…
The ultimate condemnation of a position in Reformed circles is to show that it “leads back to Rome.” Indeed, one gets the feeling that Rome is a worse destination for a Presbyterian than even hell itself. The accusation of Rome stings deeply, of course, because it means that all the…
One of the odd features of Michael Horton’s version of Covenant theology is his interpretation of the covenant God made with Abraham 1 in Genesis 15. According to Horton, The very way in which God made the covenant with Abraham (putting him to sleep; walking through the torn animals by…
What was I trying to do, when I wrote my book on Mark’s Gospel ? Fundamentally, I wanted a book that would change readers by making them better readers of the Gospel of Mark. My ideal reader is not someone who goes to the book to use as a resource…
Why do we need sacraments? According to the Westminster Confession, sacraments were instituted by Christ “to confirm our interest in him” (27.1), “to strengthen and increase” the “faith” of those within the Covenant of Grace and “to distinguish them from those that are without” that covenant (Westminster Larger Catechism, #162).…
In Isaiah 5:1-7, we have a typical covenant lawsuit, in which the Lord accuses his people of rejecting his grace and mercy. It is not my intention here to exegete the entire passage, or to look at the way the vineyard image used here serves as a metaphor in other…
Showing page 222 of 309
Showing page 41 of 43
R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture - the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be…
Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. The next day, Veronica Lueken of Bayside, New York, was praying to St. Therese of Lisieux for Kennedy when she was surrounded by the fragrance of roses. Over the next months, she began writing poetry that she later attributed to St.…
Over at the Trinity House site , I analyze the sevenfold description of Israel’s “good land” in Deuteronomy 8.
In a 2010 article in the Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics , natural law theorist Jean Porter probed the question of same-sex marriage, and concluded that there were no objections in natural law to same-sex sex or to same-sex marriage as such. The article is excerpted here .…
Epistemology has often been viewed as a debate between raitonalists and empiricists. Descartes set certainty as the gold standard of knowledge, and argued from doubt to conclusions that he considered indubitable. Empiricists insist that our senses are capable of giving us reliable knowledge of the world, and in many cases…
Matthew Easter summarizes the back-and-forth of the arguments in the debate over pistis Christou. It’s a careful, judicious summary, and his conclusion seems irrefutable: The debate won’t be resolved by grammar alone, since “interpreters resort either intentionally or unintentionally to their larger models for reading Paul that are already in…
Showing page 534 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
