Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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One of the most impressive feats of Reformation ecumenism was the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, signed by Capito, Bucer, and Musculus on the Reformed side and Luther and Melanchthon, among others, on the Lutheran side. Luther admitted that the two groups diverged on various details, but declared, in a deeply…
In his Revelation of St. John the Divine (171), GB Caird offers this bit of history to illuminate the significance of the beast from the land (Revelation 13:11-18): “In the province of Asia the imperial cult was in the hands of a body known in Greek as the koinon and…
Scott Manetsch’s Calvin’s Company of Pastors is a rich contribution to the history of pastoral theology and care in the Reformation era. If you want a detailed, vivid portrait of the training and selection of Geneva’s pastors, their weekly schedules, the liturgies they performed and the resources they had available…
America is abandoning the last remnants of our historic Christian foundations. This is most obvious in law, where specifically Christian claims are ruled unConstitutional precisely because they are Christian claims. It’s evident in the universities and among intellectual elites, who cannot make sense of a theological argument that claims to…
It was a well-nigh universal trope of Reformation rhetoric that the Reformers were the catholics who had to defend orthodoxy and catholicity against the sectarianism of the Roman church. Luther disputed the Catholic claim that obedience to Rome was the definition of catholicity, and disputed it on the basis of…
William Perkins is known mainly among Reformed Christians with an affinity for the Puritans. It’s refreshing to have now W.B. Patterson’s substantial monograph on Perkins’s life and theology, published last year by Oxford. After setting the stage with a chapter on the Elizabethan religious settlement, Patterson examines Perkins as “apologist…
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