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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The macro-structures of The Fairie Queene become clear if we look at a single book in detail. Book 1 is a good place to start. It is the story of Holiness, focused on the Redcrosse Knight and Una. Redcrosse is called upon to rescue the parents of a damsal in…
John Podhoretz ( Weekly Standard , March 2) admits that he giggled his way through Fifty Shades of Grey . The movie. He doesn't seem in a giggly mood about the novels, which he describes as “the worst books I have every read all the way through.” But Podhoretz spots…
Theodore Vial's Liturgy Wars is a rich and detailed account of the struggle over the change in the baptismal rite in 19th-century Zurich. He picks the knot of this culture war, unraveling the political, theological, and ritual dimensions of the the battle between liberalizing and conserving forces. Vial's aims go…
Chris Jenks argues in Subculture that “postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which society, and, in many senses, the social bond, of yesterday were established” (3). One of the key theoretical tools has been an…
Brian Howell's In the Eyes of God is a substantial contribution to the discussion of theological language and to our understanding of the workings of biblical anthropomorphism. His approach rests on the “three legs” of “the biblical depiction of the divine-human relationship, divine Speech Acts, and context-sensitive metaphorical interpretation” (57).…
David Hawkes's TLS review of Marisa Cull's Shakespeare's Princes of Wales sums up the influence of Wales on Elizabethan England, and on England's Bard in particular: “The Bard (the very term has a specifically Welsh provenance) had a Welsh grandmother, Alys Griffin. The man who taught him his ‘small Latin,'…
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