Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I appreciate Andy Webb’s recent entry into the current discussion over baptismal efficacy. 1 This is an issue which has consumed a great deal of time and energy in the Reformed world in recent years. It is not likely to subside soon. As a contributing party to the discussion, I…
The Covenant Vision of the Heidelberg & Westminster Catechisms Regarding Children and Baptism 7 POINTS ABOUT THE TEACHING OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death? Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but…
Is the Holiday Unpresbyterian? ‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others 1 ) claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to…
This month we begin by considering Alan D. Strange’s article, “Understanding the ‘Federal Vision'” published in the February 2007 issue of New Horizons, the official denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Mr. Strange is an OPC minister, a teacher at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and was a member of the…
There is no reason to believe that Matthew 24, Mark 13, or Luke 21 records Jesus prophesying about what is now known in Christian theology as “the Second Coming.” In my opinion, the fact that most modern conservative Christian scholars and pastors are not yet willing to acknowledge that the…
Francis Turretin, the Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century, carefully distinguishes the Reformed view of infant faith from Lutheran and Anabaptist claims. Anabaptists denied any faith to infants so that they could justify their refusal to baptize them. Lutherans affirmed (rightly) that covenant infants were believers, but made no distinction…
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Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5 th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser's…
R omantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. For Herder, a nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character." (I rely on this essay by Richard White.) People have…
Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala , serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes ( Imagined Communities , 74-5), “In the eighteenth century…
In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere ) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male…
In his E nglish Literature in the Sixteenth Century , CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It…
Conrad Rudolph's The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the…
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