Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Brief Comparison of Calvin’s Institutes with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms regarding the shape of imputation This essay is a brief argument that the soteriology of John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion regarding union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness is the same as…
The thoughts in this paper were largely prompted by a study of Walter E. Krebs, “The Word and the Sacraments,” Mercersburg Review (July, 1867), 366-383. The discussion in this paper presupposes my earlier studies of baptism, “Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future” and “Calvin on Baptism,…
Sometimes our systematic theology creates an illusion of precision. For example, we distinguish the ground and instrument of justification. Justification is grounded in Christ’s work alone, and is instrumentally received by faith alone. That makes good sense and guards us from thinking that faith itself is somehow meritorious. All the…
Whenever we participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we remember Christ and His Work for us. We remember. And in remembering, we imitate God, as His creatures made after His image. God remembers. This is mysterious to us because we usually think of remembering in the context of our…
It is standard in paedobaptist circles to argue for the baptism of infants out of the Old Covenant system. Because there is no explicit command in the New Testament, we are left to the broader principles and patterns of Scripture. In the Old Covenant, we continually find that the children…
Luther popularized the law/gospel hermeneutic. Luther argued that any demands God made upon us fell into the category of “law” and could only condemn. By contrast, anything God gave us was “gospel” and came with no strings attached. Calvin paid lip service to this law/gospel antithesis, even though it was…
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Responding to NT Wright’s response to the critics of his resurrection book, John Dominic Crossan registered three agreements and three points in what he called an amicus curiae brief. The agreements: 1) “Resurrection” means the general bodily resurrection. To say Jesus is raised is to say that the general bodily…
Jack Collins of Covenant Seminary gave a fine paper on translation theory at ETS. He argued for “essentially literal” translation, or what he also called “transparent translation.” The goal of such translation is to render the original text in the receptor language as much as possible, and to make the…
Did Calvin teach that faith is obedience? Sam Waldron of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says Yes and No to that. On the one hand, Waldron argued in an ETS paper, Calvin does teach that faith is obedience, not only inseparable from obedience but actually IS obedience. He quoted from Calvin’s…
Vern Poythress gave an excellent paper at ETS on truth and fullness of meaning. It was typical Poythress ?Earguing against any reductive account of meaning and language, insisting that Scripture speaks in all sorts of ways (propositions, metaphors, allusions, etc), well-informed about contemporary trends in linguistics and philosophy. Here are…
There were two good presentations on Edwards theology at ETS this morning. The first, by Robert Caldwell of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, focused on the role of the Spirit in Edwards’s Christology. Caldwell’s main point was that the Spirit is the mediator of the union of the divine and…
The ever-inventive Jim Jordan points out this cool sequence at the center of the prophecy of Isaiah: 1) The Assyrians threaten Jerusalem, but the Lord delivers the city because of the intercession of King Hezekiah. 2) Then Hezekiah gets sick, beginning to die as king for the people. But he…
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