Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
How do covenant and election relate to one another? There are many issues of semantics that enter into this discussion and many issues of real substance, so we need to be careful. If we oversimplify, we can say that election relates to God’s eternal plan to save a people for…
Shortly after the Last Supper and before his final arrest, Jesus said these words to his remaining eleven faithful disciples: I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit…
Was Caleb saved by faith or works? Caleb is just one of many thousands of Hebrews who entered the Promised Land after spending years in the wilderness being led by Moses. God had delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and gave them a law at Mount Sinai based on…
For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5.7) So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of…
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (which is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth” (Ephesians 6.1-3). Honor your father and your mother, that your…
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For Thomas, the advantage of explicating the Trinity by reference to knowing and willing was that these are two human processes that remain within the soul.  They remain within the realm of praxis. Jenson notes that the great achievement of Barth’s Trinitarian theology is to start elsewhere, not with “self-contained”…
Gregory of Nyssa identifies Arianism as a form of tragic metaphysics.  They go astray because they “define God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divide eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find that mark of…
Is God’s being in His becoming?  We might not want to say that.  But we can’t avoid the question, if we want to continue the patristic project of “evangelizing metaphysics.” For the Greeks, Jenson writes, “Being” is “what satisfies the mind’s longing for absolute assurance, for transcendence over time’s surprises.”…
Definitely not this either: “there is properly no mutual love between the Father and Son, for this would presuppose two acts” and “within the Trinity there is no reciprocal ‘Thou.’”
Barth did not see Nazism as a reaction to or restriction on the untrammeled freedom of choice celebrated by modern liberals.  On the contrary, it was itself the product of the same “false concept of freedom” that shaped post-Enlightenment Europe. If freedom means life “in free competition of persons, systems,…
Barth argues that the Trinity is not a challenge or a qualification of monotheism, but the only true form of monotheism.  Antitrinitarianism always collapses either into the denial of God’s revelation or of God’s unity. Denial of revelation because “To the degree that it maintains the unity of God it…
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