Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
While I think Zacharias Ursinus’ thinking would be profitable to consider, I am not recording his reflections in order for readers to come to agreement with his position as a whole. Rather, my interest is twofold. First, I think the way the Heidelberg Catechisms is used as a “proof” of…
On this question Hebrews 10 is quite clear and really needs no additional argument. For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume…
Not all readers of this essay letter may be aware of it, but a tempest has been brewing in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a tempest created by the liberal party in that denomination. It came about this way. In January 2002, a Pastor’s Conference on covenant theology was…
Once upon a time there was such a thing as Calvinistic thought. It existed when I was younger, but seems to have largely disappeared in recent years. But let me elaborate. When I became a Calvinist, back in 1970, I bought a bunch of books. Over the next few years,…
CHRIST THE PREACHER How Ephesians Shows Us Why Preaching is Essential to Salvation & Sanctification Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a…
Tracking the informal shifts in Protestant opinion regarding Baptism can be a difficult business. For example, in 1849 Anglican clergyman William Goode published his defense of Evangelicalism against the Anglo-Catholics under the title, The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the Effects of Baptism in the Case of…
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“How can a man be born again when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus’ way of putting the question sounds childish; but it’s a common question.  My life is a mess, and what’s done cannot be undone.  Then along comes Jesus mocking…
Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction.  This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within the context of recent film criticism, it is appropriate to…
Noel Carroll argues that anti-intentionalist structuralist criticism aims to maximize aesthetic enjoyment, at the expense of all other purposes of art and literature.  This, he argues, “has a very ‘consumerist’ ring to it.  In Buberesque lingo, it reduces our relation to the text to an I/it relationship.”  By contrast, Carroll…
In case you got bogged down and missed the plot, Thornton Wilder helpfully summarizes what he describes as Joyce’s “Night Book”: “We overhear and oversee [the hero] in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin.  His conscience is trying him for some obscure misdemeanors committed - or perhaps…
In his treatise Contra Gentiles , Athanasius reproduces an argument from the Phaedrus that provides the immortality of the soul.  Anything that has to be moved by something else is mortal and finite; whatever moves of itself is immortal, and immortally mobile.  What is most fully mobile is what is…
Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.” Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says.  Try reading Kafka and remaining in disinterested contemplation: Kafka’s novels…
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