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John

A Conversation at the Sheep Pool (John 5)

One evening at dusk two men met under a portico near the North wall in Jerusalem. They greeted one another cordially and sat down on a stone bench. They were both Pharisees. One of the men appeared to be uncomfortable and kept looking around nervously. The other said, “Don’t worry,…

by Jeff MeyersJuly 28, 2020
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Christology

Real Union or Legal Fiction? | Nevin’s Controversy With Charles Hodge Over the Imputation of Adam’s Sin

John Williamson Nevin’s Controversy With Charles Hodge Over the Imputation of Adam’s Sin (with a Comparison to Robert L. Dabney) If one is blessed to discover George P. Hutchinsons’s monograph on Original Sin in nineteenth-century Reformed thought, 1 no student of American presbyterianism can fail to be fascinated. What once…

by Mark HorneJuly 21, 2020
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Biblical Theology

Fire on the Mountain

If you stop people on the street and ask them, “Where is God?” you’ll get a range of responses from a vague sense that He’s “up there somewhere” to a generic omnipresence (and it goes downhill from there!) What God does in Acts 2 challenges us to develop and apply…

by Tim NicholsJuly 14, 2020
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Matthew

The Sign of Jonah

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as…

by Ken HicksJuly 7, 2020
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Genesis

Lost Worlds?

John Walton believes that modern Christians have lost multiple worlds: The Lost World of Genesis One; The Lost World of Adam and Eve; The Lost World of Scripture; The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest; The Lost World of the Flood; The Lost World of the Torah. I believe this…

by Ralph Allan SmithJuly 2, 2020
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Interview

N.T. Wright on How the Church Should Respond to the Pandemic

How should the church respond to the pandemic? N.T. Wright has written a book which searches the depths of Scripture to answer this question. Our challenge is that we do not yet understand the pandemic, at least not with any degree of consensus. We don't know whose fault it is,…

by Jerry Bowyer & N.T. WrightJune 30, 2020

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Aesthetic Theory of Atonement, Again Again

Brian Leftow ends his 1995 Modern Schoolman article with this: “Anselm’s appeal to fittingness, then, might serve to undermine the claim the value of efficiency has on God’s choices. For if beauty can trump efficiency, it could be a rational virtue for a perfectly wise being to act inefficiently, if…

February 26, 2013

Rational poetry

In a couple earlier posts , I took a look at the aesthetic dimensions of Anselm’s theory of the atonement. He certainly begins with a patristic atonement theory stressing the poetic symmetry of fall and redemption, and aesthetic concepts keep cropping up all along. But it seems that he abandons…

February 25, 2013

Elegant Atonement

In a 1995 article in Modern Schoolman on Anselm’s theory of atonement, Brian Leftow offers this list of “incidental benefits” that, Anselm claims, follow from God’s choice to save through incarnation and cross. It’s a demonstration of the “elegance” of the atonement. The rest of this post is directly quoted…

February 25, 2013

Unrequired gift

According to Bavinck ( Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume , 442-3), vicarious satisfaction means that Christ gives to God all that He demands from us, which we are incapable of giving: “The demand posed by God to fallen humanity was twofold: one, that humans would keep the law perfectly,…

February 25, 2013

Masters and slaves

A characteristically hilarious rant from Tom Shone about movie directors as “masters”: “it must be a terrific thrill to boss people around like that, and be rude to the press, and stick conversations about life, plants, astronomy into a movie on someone else’s dime just because one can, because one…

February 25, 2013

A Vision of Social Harmony

Take a look at James Jordan’s second essay in a series on “Continuing the Reformation” at the Trinity House site.

February 25, 2013

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