Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World As I mentioned above, the history of Israel involved several centuries as a church-without-a-culture, and then several centuries as a culture-without-a-city. To be sure, there was an informal culture around the church of the Patriarchs, but the civilization of free farmers…
In the Reformation Tradition we baptize both professing believers and their children. In the case of infants it is now commonly insisted that this is done because the children are already in covenant with God. Baptism is a sign and seal of a previously existing reality. Despite the popularity of…
Concerning Sex & the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf of bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato, virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the mumbo-jumbo and — presto! — the sacraments confer…
In 27.2, the Westminster Confession says that because of the “spiritual relation” between sacraments and the things they represent, “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” Applied to baptism, this means that when the Bible says that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6), it…
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Much of the following wedding sermon was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s recent Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places . I read from the first chapter of John’s First Epistle. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at…
Bones are the last part of a person to decay, and so in Scripture they are often used to designate the person in a state of death or a continuing existence after death (cf. Joseph’s bones). The bones of a nation are the remnant that are left after a nation’s…
Eugene Peterson’s latest book, the first of a five-volume spiritual theology, takes its title from some lovely lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…
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