Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Book Review The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation & Evangelism by Norman Shepherd The Call of Grace is an excellent manual to put in the hands of laymen to teach them how to rest in God’s grace while taking seriously the prize of the upward call of…
My Role as a Parent in My Children’s Salvation Evangeline Jael Horne is our third child. My two boys were born while we were at seminary and we had the privilege of giving them to Jeff Meyers, our pastor at that time, for baptism. When Evangeline was born, however, I…
John Calvin writes in the Institutes about the possibility of admitting children to the Lord’s Supper by virtue of their baptism once and only once: At length they object, that there is not greater reason for admitting infants to baptism than to the Lord’s Supper, to which, however, they are…
The debate over paedocommunion does not seem to have made much headway on either side in recent years. Certainly both sides have made a solid effort to argue for their position. But no resolution seems to be forthcoming in the near future. As a convinced paedocommunionist, I find the church’s…
Lots of conservative Protestants want to answer “no” to this question. The problem with this position is that conservative Protestants are bound to believe what the Bible teaches. And the Bible says inconvenient things, like “baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3.21), or “all of you who were baptized into…
This paper is something of a follow-up to my earlier study, “ Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future .” One of the more controversial aspects of that paper was my claim that Calvin held to a very high view of baptismal efficacy. Indeed, he was a…
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Michael Gorman ( Becoming the Gospel ) points out what Richard Hays has called the “deft word-play” on the dik - root in 1 Corinthians 6:1-11. The word-play is sometimes lost because English translations use different word groups to translate different forms of the root. If we stick to a…
Since Harnack, theologians have glibly spoken of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo as a form of “atonement theory” or a “model” of atonement. According to Katherine Sonderegger, Harnack told the story of atonement theology in terms of a set of “competing ‘models,' each with schools and eponymous heads”: “Harnack’s nineteenth-century magisterial…
In an essay form Israel's Prophetic Heritage , Bernard W. Anderson analyzes the “exodus typology” in what he calls “second Isaiah” (available here ). He acknowledges that “there are numerous linguistic echoes of the Exodus tradition” throughout the text, he finds ten places where “the new exodus is the specific…
In a famous 1949 essay on “ Science and Ideology ,” published in American Economic Review , Joseph Schumpeter highlighted the role of ideology is scientific research, including economic research. The majority of economists, he said, “are ready enough to admit its presence though, like Marx, they find it only…
In his book, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 , Stephen Kern explores how technological innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (“telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane,” 1) reoriented the experience of time and space. Simultaneous communication seemed to erase space, and rapid…
The New Testament speaks of the “seal of the Spirit” in several places (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:13; 4:30). The Spirit marks out believers, sealing them for the day of redemption. The Spirit is the seal, or affixes the seal - a brand, a mark of ownership, a regimental tattoo…
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