Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I appreciate Andy Webb’s recent entry into the current discussion over baptismal efficacy. 1 This is an issue which has consumed a great deal of time and energy in the Reformed world in recent years. It is not likely to subside soon. As a contributing party to the discussion, I…
The Covenant Vision of the Heidelberg & Westminster Catechisms Regarding Children and Baptism 7 POINTS ABOUT THE TEACHING OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death? Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but…
Is the Holiday Unpresbyterian? ‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others 1 ) claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to…
This month we begin by considering Alan D. Strange’s article, “Understanding the ‘Federal Vision'” published in the February 2007 issue of New Horizons, the official denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Mr. Strange is an OPC minister, a teacher at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and was a member of the…
There is no reason to believe that Matthew 24, Mark 13, or Luke 21 records Jesus prophesying about what is now known in Christian theology as “the Second Coming.” In my opinion, the fact that most modern conservative Christian scholars and pastors are not yet willing to acknowledge that the…
Francis Turretin, the Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century, carefully distinguishes the Reformed view of infant faith from Lutheran and Anabaptist claims. Anabaptists denied any faith to infants so that they could justify their refusal to baptize them. Lutherans affirmed (rightly) that covenant infants were believers, but made no distinction…
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On the Psalms, Calvin wrote: “although David speak of himself in this Psalme: yit he speaketh not as a common person, but as one that beareth the person of Christ, bicause he was the universall pattern of the whole Churche: and the same is a thing worth the marking, too…
Samuel Mather wrote that “types relate not only to the Person of Christ; but to his Benefits, and to all Gospel Truths and Mysteries, even to all New Testament Dispensations.” To speak of “types of Christ” is thus not merely to speak of types fulfilled in Jesus, but types that…
William Perkins on the one sense of Scripture, referring specifically to Galatians 4: “There is but one full and intire sense of every place of scripture, and that is also the literal sense . . . . To make many senses of scripture is to overturn all sense, and to…
Lewalski’s book makes clear just how much the Reformation owed to the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, among many other things, rhetoric’s reaction to centuries of dialetical hegemony, and Lewalski shows in great detail that in England at least Protestant fully shared the Renaissance obsession with rhetoric.
William Perkins on figures of speech: “There is a certaine agreement and proportion of the externall things with the internall, and of the actions of one with the actions of the other: wherby it commeth to passe, that the signes, as it were certaine visible words incurring into the externall…
I have found Thomas’s explanation of the quadriga convincing. He argues that the multiple spiritual senses are not “located” in the words but in the things that the words name. One might say that for Thomas the words have a single, namely literal, sense; but the things they name are…
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