Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Book Review The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation & Evangelism by Norman Shepherd The Call of Grace is an excellent manual to put in the hands of laymen to teach them how to rest in God’s grace while taking seriously the prize of the upward call of…
My Role as a Parent in My Children’s Salvation Evangeline Jael Horne is our third child. My two boys were born while we were at seminary and we had the privilege of giving them to Jeff Meyers, our pastor at that time, for baptism. When Evangeline was born, however, I…
John Calvin writes in the Institutes about the possibility of admitting children to the Lord’s Supper by virtue of their baptism once and only once: At length they object, that there is not greater reason for admitting infants to baptism than to the Lord’s Supper, to which, however, they are…
The debate over paedocommunion does not seem to have made much headway on either side in recent years. Certainly both sides have made a solid effort to argue for their position. But no resolution seems to be forthcoming in the near future. As a convinced paedocommunionist, I find the church’s…
Lots of conservative Protestants want to answer “no” to this question. The problem with this position is that conservative Protestants are bound to believe what the Bible teaches. And the Bible says inconvenient things, like “baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3.21), or “all of you who were baptized into…
This paper is something of a follow-up to my earlier study, “ Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future .” One of the more controversial aspects of that paper was my claim that Calvin held to a very high view of baptismal efficacy. Indeed, he was a…
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During the staging of his play before the king, Hamlet mutters the word “Wormwood.” Why? Irwin Matus suggests the following: “Rarely glossed in editions of the play, wormwood is accepted as meaning only something bitter, from the taste of the plant of that name. However, the plant was also used…
Shakespeare’s two tetrologies on English history trace the shift from a sacrally based political order (Richard II) to a “Machiavellian” one (Richard III). That is the sequence of actual history. But the sequence of Shakespeare’s composition is different. Shakespeare wrote the historically later tetrology (2 Parts of Henry VI and…
Markus Barth highlights the judicial cast of Paul’s statement in Ephesians 2:7 that we “show the surpassing riches of His grace.” The verb “show” or “prove” is a lawcourt term, pointing to the presentation of evidence or a judicial demonstration. God has raised us up in Jesus to the heavenly…
Ephesians 2:14: He Himself is our peace. Jesus is the one who brings peace between God and man. He has reconciled us to God, and brought near those who have been far off. But in our sermon text Paul is chiefly concerned with the peace that Jesus has brought between…
According to Paul, the church is being built into a holy dwelling, a temple in which the Spirit dwells. This has many implications, but let me highlight one. According to the Old Testament, temples were holy places whose holiness had to be guarded and defended. Levites guarded the tabernacle and…
From Francis Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum , 7.1: “For as the fable goes of the basilisk, that if he sees you first, you die for it, but if you see him first, he dies; so itis with deceits, impostures, and evil arts, which, if they be first espied, they lose…
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