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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Federal Vision

Justification by Union with Christ Only Through Living Faith

A Brief Comparison of Calvin’s Institutes with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms regarding the shape of imputation This essay is a brief argument that the soteriology of John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion regarding union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness is the same as…

by Mark HorneJune 5, 2003
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Baptism

Some Thoughts on the Means of Grace: A Few Proposals

The thoughts in this paper were largely prompted by a study of Walter E. Krebs, “The Word and the Sacraments,” Mercersburg Review (July, 1867), 366-383. The discussion in this paper presupposes my earlier studies of baptism, “Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future” and “Calvin on Baptism,…

by Rich LuskJune 3, 2003
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Baptism

Faith, Baptism, & Justification

Sometimes our systematic theology creates an illusion of precision. For example, we distinguish the ground and instrument of justification. Justification is grounded in Christ’s work alone, and is instrumentally received by faith alone. That makes good sense and guards us from thinking that faith itself is somehow meritorious. All the…

by Rich LuskJune 1, 2003
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Covenant

DO THIS AS MY MEMORIAL: Understanding How the Lord’s Supper Reminds God to Keep Covenant

Whenever we participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we remember Christ and His Work for us. We remember. And in remembering, we imitate God, as His creatures made after His image. God remembers. This is mysterious to us because we usually think of remembering in the context of our…

by Mark HorneMay 30, 2003
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Baptism

Calvin & the Efficacy of Infant Baptism

It is standard in paedobaptist circles to argue for the baptism of infants out of the Old Covenant system. Because there is no explicit command in the New Testament, we are left to the broader principles and patterns of Scripture. In the Old Covenant, we continually find that the children…

by Rich LuskMay 30, 2003
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Biblical Theology

Why the Law/Gospel Paradigm is Flawed

Luther popularized the law/gospel hermeneutic. Luther argued that any demands God made upon us fell into the category of “law” and could only condemn. By contrast, anything God gave us was “gospel” and came with no strings attached. Calvin paid lip service to this law/gospel antithesis, even though it was…

by Rich LuskMay 29, 2003

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History

Counter-culture and post-modern

Kumar notes that the 1960s counter-culture set itself against everything in modernism: “Pop art and pop music, the ‘new wave’ in cinema and the ‘new novel’ in literature, thne elision of the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ the cultivation of sensibility through sex and drugs rather than aesthetic contemplation of…

February 24, 2006
History

Early McLaren?

In a 1965 essay, Leslie Fiedler celebrated the new movements of the 1960s as post-modern, post-Freudian, post-Humanist, post-Protestant, post-white, post-male.

February 24, 2006
History

Postmodernism/ity

Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no longer useful to distinguish subsystems within the social world -…

February 24, 2006
History

Two modernisms

Kumar defines modernism as an intellectual, cultural and artistic revolt against modernity. Yet modernism itself, especially as expressed in architecture, was complex and racked with internal contradictions: “It could denounce the ‘inauthentic’ present in the name of the future, as in Futurism and Constructivism; and it could with equal force…

February 24, 2006
History

Two modernities?

At least two: The modernity of science and technology, the factory system and city planning, of bureacracy and management. And on the other hand the modernity of sensibility, literature, hedonism, the lust for ever-new experience. On the one hand, Industrialization; on the other, the Romanticism that challenged it. On the…

February 24, 2006
History

Liquid modernity

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relationships . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Zygmunt Bauman? No: Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto .

February 24, 2006

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