Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Platitudes are often sayings whose truthfulness is so apparent, so accepted, and so repeated that they are divested of their power and in fact become the object of ridicule. Their failure lies in their fame, and the contempt they invite is bred by their familiarity. To say that children are…
Click here to download the Translation Here we have the seven-fold Voice of Yahweh, bracketed by two sets of four lines about Yahweh. The central seven-fold Voice section uses "Yahweh" ten times, for a total in this psalm of eighteen usages of "Yahweh" (3 x 3 x 2). The psalm,…
As Adam and Eve walked to the Garden of Eden to meet with Yahweh on their first Sabbath they conversed about the origin and age of the earth. Adam: You know, honey, we spent a lot of time yesterday making preparations for this house, and we still have an awful…
Knowing His paths through Moses and David, in the darkness of the prophets we yet walk in His light. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted…
These days, to be “candid” is to be frank, honest, genuine. But the word didn’t always mean that. It used to be the name for a virtue that we don’t really have a name for anymore. Its obsolete meaning is “kindliness”: a disposition to think well of others, a tendency…
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The medieval arguments in favor of the notion of preparation for justification through created grace are founded on anthropological and cosmological claims. McGrath summarizes the Summa Fratris Alexandri , which he calls “the first systematic discussion of the nature of created grace,” as follows: “The Holy Spirit can be said…
Here is a hypothesis or suspicion, not a conclusion, much less a conviction: The notion that God rewards what we do with what we have, and the notion that we are purely passive in salvation are not, as they appear, extreme opposites, but are two positions within the same framework.…
Charles Hodge doesn’t quite get to justification as deliverdict here, but he comes close: “[Paul] had just said that the believer cannot continue to serve sin. He here [in 6:7] gives the reason: for he who has died (with Christ) is justified, and therefore free from sin, free from its…
Strict justice, Aquinas argued, is only possible between equals, and since God and man are not equals there is never strict justice in God’s dealings with us. Further, God being God, He is never put in debt to His creatures, never obligated to give anything, unless by His own prior…
According to Calvin, only in a qualified sense. McGrath says, “The later Franciscan school, the via moderna and the schola Augustiniana moderna regarded the ratio meriti as lying in the divine good pleasure; nothing was meritorious unless God chose to accept it as such. This teaching was extended to include…
I have been greatly helped here by Cynthia Nielsen’s online summaries of Marion’s book. 1) One of Marion’s main ambitions is to move beyond the Western concern with being with its concomitant focus on the “object.” In place of “objectness,” a static notion of the things of the world, Marion…
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