Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Rounding Out the Traditional Doctrine of Justification Justification and the Church The traditional Protestant doctrine of justification fails to fully hold together the soteriological (forgiveness of sins) and the ecclesiological (covenant membership). This is part of a larger problem, of course, namely, the dichotomizing of church and salvation. Biblically and…
John Piper’s book, Counted Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002) is, from any perspective, a passionate work. Nevertheless, I find I need to disagree with parts of it. The reason I do this is not because John Piper’s book does…
What follows is a handout for a Sunday School class I have taught recently at my church . Presbyterian doctrine teaches what the Bible says about God sovereign control over history and his unconditional choice (election) to bring some people to everlasting glory while allowing others to remain in unbelief…
“Covenantal Nomism” sounds like a description of tiny contract-loving creatures who live underground. But it is actually a recent term used to describe the pattern of religious belief and practice in first-century Palestinian Judaism. The idea is that God graciously establishes a structured relationship based on promises, a “covenant,” with…
What follows deals primarily with two essays, one by Dr. Douglas Kelly and the other by The Rev. Richard Phillips . My reason for writing this essay is that many people are confidently saying things about N. T. Wright that I believe are contrary to fact. I choose Dr. Kelly…
The Bible is often treated as a book of rules with directions for living. To some extent, that is true; but it is neither the whole truth nor the most important truth about the book. Ultimately, the Bible is a story about God and man and their reconciliation in Christ.…
Showing page 234 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
The church calendar is essentially a calendar of feast days, preceded by days of preparation for feasting. Advent is a time of preparation for the feast of Christmas, when we celebrate the Father’s gift of His Son; Lent is a time of preparation for the feast of Easter, when we…
Kumar argues that postmodernism is characterized by a contempt for the past, and by an embrace of the “depthless present.” The result is an obsession with space: “The plane of the timeless present is the spatial. If things do not get their significance from their place in history, they can…
Ulrich Beck suggests that the contemporary world is less post-modern than radicalized modernity, a modernity that has become self-conscious and self-reflexive. He writes: “Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity…
Though not altogether obvious in English, the names Jehoahaz and Ahaziah are variations of the same name (cf. 2 Kings 13). Jeho = iah, both references to Yahweh’s name, and the verb “ahaz” is common to both. “Ahaz” means “to seize, to lay hold,” and the name “Yah lays hold”…
Many Christians observe the last few Sundays before Lent as “pre-Lenten” Sundays. This might look slightly daft: After all, Lent is itself a period of preparation for Easter, and if we need a time of preparation for the time of preparation, perhaps we also need a pre-pre-Lent to prepare for…
Ihab Hassan contrasted modernism and postmodernism by reference to Authority and Anarchy. He suggested, in Kumar’s summary, that postmodernism “involved a tendency toward ‘Indeterminacy,’ a compound of pluralism, eclecticism, randomness and revolt. Indeterminacy also connoted ‘deformation,’ a stress on decreation, difference, discontinuity and ‘detotalization’ which together add up to a…
Showing page 1876 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
