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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Yesterday, I summed up an article by Phillip Gray arguing that Yoder and Hauerwas end up Donatist, and also fail to account for the history of the church since they assume that the true church is pacifist. Yoder, though, isn’t as perfectionist as that. In When War Is Unjust ,…
Constantine’s legislation can be brutal and his rhetoric scathing. Not infrequently, though, the invective and brutality are directed at the powerful in defense of the weak. He decreed that the hands of greedy civil servants and judges would be removed, but what’s most interesting is the crime that provokes this…
INTRODUCTION Many of the proverbs in chapter 26 share the basic form of a simile. Sometimes, as in verse 1, the simile is explicit in the Hebrew text (“like snow in summer” is a literal translation); at other times, the simile is not explicit in Hebrew but is implied in…
Phillip Gray scores some points against Yoder and Hauerwas in a 2008 article in Politics and Religion . He suggests, for example, that the category of “Constantinian” is too clunky to capture the differences among Christian thinkers. Various positions on church and state existed in the early church, including “Tertullian/Donatist…
Some thoughts after a stimulating discussion of Ephesians 5 with my colleague Toby Sumpter. Toby pointed out that the description of marital life in Ephesians includes a number of sacrificial terms: Husbands are to imitate the Christ who “gave Himself,” who “washes” His bride, who presents her without spot or…
In an account of life under German communism, pastor Johannel Hamel noted the truth of Paul’s promise of a “way of escape”: “Time and again God creates loopholes, so to speak, open space in the midst of closed systems of unbelief and hatred of God. Hence the possibility is offered…
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