Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Misunderstanding “Galatianism” has caused several problems in the Reformed church. Because circumcision is at issue in the Galatian epistle, some have fallen into thinking that ritual per se, rather than anything uniquely Mosaic or Jewish, is the object of Paul’s critique. Likewise, his polemic against “works of the law” is…
Many texts in the NT become more perspicuous if we keep in mind the possibility — and indeed ubiquity — of Gentile God-fearers in the Old Covenant. After the special covenant with Israel is set up, Gentiles are not altogether excluded from the hope of salvation. Israel’s special status in…
I was once trying to get a sermon out of Ephesians 1.12-14 and it seemed obvious that I should look for two parallel statements both ending with the phrase, “to the praise of his glory.” Paul here begins talking about two groups of people (“you” and “we”), and he later…
WHY A DENOMINATION WITH SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIAN ROOTS SHOULD CAREFULLY CONSIDER THE “NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PAUL” In my denomination, the PCA, we are continually haunted by the sins of our racist Southern past. It has become an annual rite at General Assembly for the issue to be addressed one way or…
Recent debates over whether or not, “justification is central” to Paul’s theology have reminded me of a sermon I once heard by a Presbyterian seminary student. This African American student challenged his audience on the sin of racism and the ways it might manifest itself among us. Like any good…
In Charles Hodge’s 1853 article, “Idea of the Church,” his stated aim is to analyze the idea of the Church proposed in the Apostles’ Creed, in which, “the Church is declared to be “the Communion of the Saints.” He writes: The conception of the Church as the communion of saints…
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Much of the following wedding sermon was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s recent Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places . I read from the first chapter of John’s First Epistle. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at…
Bones are the last part of a person to decay, and so in Scripture they are often used to designate the person in a state of death or a continuing existence after death (cf. Joseph’s bones). The bones of a nation are the remnant that are left after a nation’s…
Eugene Peterson’s latest book, the first of a five-volume spiritual theology, takes its title from some lovely lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
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