Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World As I mentioned above, the history of Israel involved several centuries as a church-without-a-culture, and then several centuries as a culture-without-a-city. To be sure, there was an informal culture around the church of the Patriarchs, but the civilization of free farmers…
In the Reformation Tradition we baptize both professing believers and their children. In the case of infants it is now commonly insisted that this is done because the children are already in covenant with God. Baptism is a sign and seal of a previously existing reality. Despite the popularity of…
Concerning Sex & the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf of bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato, virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the mumbo-jumbo and — presto! — the sacraments confer…
In 27.2, the Westminster Confession says that because of the “spiritual relation” between sacraments and the things they represent, “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” Applied to baptism, this means that when the Bible says that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6), it…
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I am honored to be a speaker at the first annual Los Angeles Theology Conference at Biola University, January 17-18, 2013. The topic is Christology, and additional information is found here: http://latheology.com/
I’ve been leading students through John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (A Theology of Lordship) for the past 15 years, and every year I’m impressed all over again. Frame is solidly biblical, creative, careful. His multiperspectival approach allows him to incorporate the best insights of nearly everyone,…
Edward Welch’s Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection is a remarkable book. It offers a penetrating, discomfiting analysis of the experience of shame, which Welch summarizes under the headings of nakedness and exposure, isolation and being an outcast, contamination and self-disgust. He sees it everywhere…
John Paul II, waxing Frankfurtian and Benjaminist, reflects on the effects of technologies that enable us to reproduce images of the human body - film and photography ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , 366-7 ): “Artistic reproduction, when it becomes the content of…
In an interview in The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (p. 22 ), Remi Brague argues that the early Christians transformed everything because they were obsessed with Christ not “Christianity itself.” They tracked “the reverberations of his coming in the whole of…
Dan Glover offers these expansions on an earlier post where I quoted Edward Vacek’s analysis of the threefold love of God ( agape , philia , eros ). The rest of this post is from Dan. Adding to your comments, perhaps each person of the Godhead serves particularly, though not…
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