Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When someone expounds the way of salvation found in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms and in the easily-accessible writings of the Reformed heritage, he often finds him embroiled in a debates about the covenant of works and the Mosaic Covenant. One is “proven” to be aberrant by allegations that one…
The ultimate condemnation of a position in Reformed circles is to show that it “leads back to Rome.” Indeed, one gets the feeling that Rome is a worse destination for a Presbyterian than even hell itself. The accusation of Rome stings deeply, of course, because it means that all the…
One of the odd features of Michael Horton’s version of Covenant theology is his interpretation of the covenant God made with Abraham 1 in Genesis 15. According to Horton, The very way in which God made the covenant with Abraham (putting him to sleep; walking through the torn animals by…
What was I trying to do, when I wrote my book on Mark’s Gospel ? Fundamentally, I wanted a book that would change readers by making them better readers of the Gospel of Mark. My ideal reader is not someone who goes to the book to use as a resource…
Why do we need sacraments? According to the Westminster Confession, sacraments were instituted by Christ “to confirm our interest in him” (27.1), “to strengthen and increase” the “faith” of those within the Covenant of Grace and “to distinguish them from those that are without” that covenant (Westminster Larger Catechism, #162).…
In Isaiah 5:1-7, we have a typical covenant lawsuit, in which the Lord accuses his people of rejecting his grace and mercy. It is not my intention here to exegete the entire passage, or to look at the way the vineyard image used here serves as a metaphor in other…
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I have a review of Douglas Farrow’s Ascension Theology at the Trinity House site today .
In their Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible , John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno make illuminating comparisons between the function of the patristic “rule of faith” and the use of hypotheses in modern science. Augustine says that whatever in Scripture doesn’t conduce to love…
In his contribution to A History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1: The Ancient Period (328), Joseph Trigg points to the grammatical origins of Irenaeus’s understanding of the rule of faith: “he relies on concepts take from Greco-Roman literary studies, the field known in Antiquity as ‘grammar’ and taught as part…
Francis was a great grammatician of gratitude. So, according to Chesterton, was Chaucer: “He is as awakening as a cool wind on a hot day, because he breathes forth something that has fallen into great neglect in our time, something that very seldom stirs the stuffy atmosphere of self-satisfaction or…
Chesterton, Ker says ( G. K. Chesterton: A Biography ), recognized that playing with children is like “wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils.” It requires “principles of the highest morality,” to decide, for instance, “before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a…
In his biography of G. K. Chesterton , Ian Ker summarizes Chesterton’s analysis of Francis’s praise of creation: “Francis’s ‘great gratitude’ for existence was not just a feeling or sentiment: it was ‘the very rock of reality,’ besides which ‘all facts’ were ‘fancies.’ This was ‘the fundamental fact which we…
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