Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Click HERE for an audio version of this article. For part 1 of this series, click HERE . The New Covenant changes none of this. There is nothing new or odd about Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet, nothing strange about various “deaconesses” serving the Incarnate Tabernacle. Paul affirms that in…
An Introduction Despite my rather hectic schedule as a father and pastor, I’ve become more and more concerned that a tract defending God’s sovereignty and fore-ordination of all things would be a helpful tool for the Reformed pastor–one converstational in tone and persuasive in style. I have decided to undertake…
There has been a great deal of controversy in the various conservative Reformed microdenominations in North America. Since I am a pastor in one of these and have been advocating a return to the historic Protestant and Confessional view over again the baptistic mutation that is now prevalent in our…
I have recently written on justification as a covenant status and justification and adoption , understood as joining with Christ and his family at the Lord’s Supper . I write about things like this because it seems quite common in America to denigrate the need for community in one’s commitment…
Samuel Miller was one of the early professors at Princeton Theological Seminary. As a Presbyterian he wrote a book that defended infant baptism . Miller’s book was fine, but his appendix on baptismal regeneration seems problematic. Of course, his initial attack on superstition is quite warranted, but I am speaking…
Awhile back I wrote the following, first quoting from the author of the excellent book, A Baptism That Saves : The sacramental view [of baptism] most accords with the idea of God’s initiating a covenant by his sovereign decree in election–effecting this through effectual calling. This is because, instead of…
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Mark 10:29-30: Jesus said, Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, but that He shall receive a hundred times as much now in the…
We think we possess things by holding on to them. We own our house and our car and our cat and our certificates of deposit when we have free and unhindered use of them. If there’s a new lock on the door when you come home from work, you don’t…
Another hurrah to Rahner. He notes that part of the standard view of grace among post-Reformation Catholics is the notion that grace is “above man’s conscious spiritual and moral life.” It is an object of faith, but it never penetrates to consciousness or experience: “only nature and its acts constitute…
Enough beating up on Rahner for the moment. He has this statement in Nature and Grace : “there has been no ‘chemically pure’ description of pure nature, but mixed in with it there are traces of elements of historical nature, i.e., nature possessing grace. Who is to say that the…
Rahner (still working in his little book, Nature and Grace ) distinguishes between “being ordered to grace” and “being directed to grace in such a way that without the actual gift of this grace it would all be meaningless.” He affirms the first, not the second. A created spirit “is…
Rahner says that the Beatific vision is “through grace” and comes as a “free gift, not due to [man] by nature, not pledged to him by his creation (so that our creation, which was a free act of God, not due to us, and the free gift of grace to…
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