Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One striking aspect of the recent “Federal Vision” conflict in the various conservative micro-Reformed groups is a debate over what older theologians really meant and said. Examining the credentials of various people who speak with great assurance on these matters one sees repeatedly degrees in church/theology history studies. In fact,…
The Worship of the English Puritans by Horton Davies really valuable book for gaining historical perspective on the American Presbyterian scene. (I will note for the record that I don’t believe there is an objective definition for “puritan” and I wish historians would stop using it and instead speak of…
This is the conclusion to Frame’s discussion about historical/covenantal election in his The Doctrine of God (pp. 329-30): Historical election and eternal election are distinct, but they cannot be entirely separated. Note the following: 1. Both historical and eternal election are aspects of God’s saving purpose. The election of Israel…
From John Frame’s The Doctrine of God : So although the election of Israel is by grace, there is an important place for continued faithfulness. Individuals can belong to the chosen people, yet lose their elect status by faithlessness and disobedience. Branches can be broken off “because of unbelief” (Rom.…
I’ve recently re-discovered an awesome theological resource, The Westminster Shorter Catechism Project . It is excellent, not least because it demonstrates the healthy diversity that has always been allowable in the Reformed Tradition until recently. For example, consider the sources attached to Question and Answer #94: Q: What is baptism?…
A friend recently asked if the frequent saying of the Pledge of Allegiance was a sign of American jingoism, or an attempt to inculcate “nationalism” of a bad sort. It seemed to him as a Canadian that that might be the case. That seemed to me to be probably backwards,…
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David Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: “If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the Jews for their decision to cleave to their ancestral religion…
A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels , which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the “ameliorative” rather than the utopian “transformative” left). “Consumerism always seems…
Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob’s Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity . Note that all these quotations are about coffee , not today’s expensive imitations - which will remain unmentioned - that allow people who dislike coffee to hang out…
Jules Michelet said: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good and bad division. 1-2 Kings explores the first of these…
By my count, there are twelve disfigurements listed in Leviticus 21:18-20 that disqualify a priest from serving at the altar and in the tabernacle: blind, lame, slit, deformed, broken foot, broken hand, hunchback, dwarf, defect of eye, eczema, scabs, crushed testicles. The listed disfigurements point to a disfigured Israel, twelve…
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