Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Reformed Doctrine Stated & Briefly Vindicated from Scripture THE REFORMED VIEW ACCORDING TO OFFICIAL PRESBYTERIAN DOCTRINE The contrast between Law and Gospel is often treated as if it were a uniquely Lutheran idea, but Reformed doctrine also uses such a formulation. In fact, the distinction is important to understanding…
According to N. T. Wright : By “the gospel” Paul does not mean “justification by faith” itself. He means the announcement that the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord. To believe this message, to give believing allegiance to Jesus as Messiah and Lord, is to be justified in the present…
Imagine two strangers who happen to be standing on the same subway train; we’ll call one Joe and the other Larry. Joe accidentally steps on the Larry’s foot so that he, in a flash of pain, thinking Joe did it intentionally, resorts to name calling and says something about Joe’s…
Imagine being a small child at an orphanage. One day, one of your caretakers comes rushing to you as you play in the common yard. “I have great news!” she tells you, excitedly. “What is it?” you ask. “A wonderful family has adopted you. They’re at the courthouse right now…
The Westminster Standards, Repentance, & Pardon REPENTANCE ENTAILS ALL OF LIFE According the Westminster Divines, “repentance to life” is an “evangelical” (WCF 15.1) and “saving” (WLC #87) “grace”. By it, a sinner, out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness…
Click HERE for an audio version of this article. For Part 2, click HERE . The ordination of women to the Christian ministry, specifically the pastoral office of overseeing worship and performing preaching and the Lord’s Supper, is a recent development in Church history. From the early church until the…
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According to the standard story, Catholicism made its peace with democracy rather suddenly in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Vatican II. On this narrative, Vatican I represented the kind of authoritarianism that the second Vatican council overturned. Not so, argues Emile Perreau-Saussine in his Catholicism and…
Looking at maps of the 19th-century globe, you get the impression of a solid, complete (and a solidly and completely pink) British empire. That’s a “cartographical illusion,” says John Darwin in his Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain . We forget that “this was always an empire-in-making, indeed an…
An 1880 ad for Singer Sewing machines offers a vision of humanity united by technology: “On every sea are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon its errand of helpfulness. Its cheering…
Why did the Greeks and Romans sacrifice? The TLS reviewer of two new books on the subject, Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through Roman Periods and Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers , summarizes the main theories, which come from Walter…
The debate over Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False continues apace. The TLS reviewer observes that Nagel’s “provocation” of a book doesn’t simply demand an explanation for how consciousness arose, but demands to know how consciousness is so central a…
In Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation , Roger Scruton pinpoints the ethical and metaphysical issue in same-sex sexuality: “The heterosexual ventures towards an individual whose gender confines him within another world. The homosexual unites with an individual who does not lie beyond the divide which separates the world of men…
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