Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This year’s Biblical Horizons conference was another great success and we would like to thank all those who were involved by helping out with the catering or opening up their homes to attendees and speakers. The talks, open-ended as they were, offered a fresh perspective and food for thought on…
I find myself often rehearsing conversations with my children. When the house is quiet in the late evening, and I'm standing in front of a pile of soapy dishes, I think about what I am going to say to them in certain situations. When I am driving in the car,…
In Matthew 24:29 , Jesus employs “cosmic language,” signs in the sun, moon and stars, to predict the imminent end of the Old Covenant. His first-century audience would have recognized His allusion to the prophecy against Babylon in Isaiah 13 and understood His discourse as a condemnation of Jerusalem as…
The Enthroned One speaks to John (Revelation 21:6): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” It's a little theology proper. For starters, there's the Greek version of…
In reading about how we got into this mess, I came across a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I think the church could learn from if we are going to counter the Obergefell ruling. Prior to 2009, same sex “marriage” had gone to the ballot box thirty-one times in…
In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…
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McGrath notes that Augustine interpreted the genitive in the phrase “righteousness of God” in Rom 1 objectively, so that it was understood as the righteousness that God gives in saving sinners (in “making” them righteous). Ambrosiaster, as I pointed out in an earliet post, interpreted the genitive subjectively - the…
Ambrosiaster writes, “Iustitia est Dei, quia quod promisit dedit, ideo credens hoc esse se consecutum quod promiserat Deus per prophetas suos, iustum Deum probat et testis est iustitiae eius” (PL, 17.56b). McGrath explains: “God, having promised to give salvation, subsequently gives it, and as a result is deemed to be…
Nevin wrote: “There is more a great deal in Christianity, I firmly believe, more in the idea of hte Holy Catholic Church, than has yet been attained, either in the way of knowledge or in the way of life, by the Protestant Reformation.”
There was a consensus among the theologians of Trent, McGrath argues, that justification was “factitive,” a view that excluded that “a sinner may be justified solely as a matter of reputation or imputation, while remaining a sinner in fact.” But of course that raises the question, What exactly is a…
McGrath traces the odd development in Lutheran Orthodoxy of the notion that regeneration and faith precede justification in such a way that “where Luther had understood justification to concern the unbelieving sinner, orthodoxy revised this view, referring justification to the believing sinner.” This takes Lutheran Orthodoxy back in the direction…
McGrath notes, “While justification was universally understood to involve the regeneration of humanity, the opinion that an ontological change is thereby effected within humans is particularly associated with the period of High Scholasticism and the development of the concept of created grace. The earlier medieval theologians expressed the change effected…
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