Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Misunderstanding “Galatianism” has caused several problems in the Reformed church. Because circumcision is at issue in the Galatian epistle, some have fallen into thinking that ritual per se, rather than anything uniquely Mosaic or Jewish, is the object of Paul’s critique. Likewise, his polemic against “works of the law” is…
Many texts in the NT become more perspicuous if we keep in mind the possibility — and indeed ubiquity — of Gentile God-fearers in the Old Covenant. After the special covenant with Israel is set up, Gentiles are not altogether excluded from the hope of salvation. Israel’s special status in…
I was once trying to get a sermon out of Ephesians 1.12-14 and it seemed obvious that I should look for two parallel statements both ending with the phrase, “to the praise of his glory.” Paul here begins talking about two groups of people (“you” and “we”), and he later…
WHY A DENOMINATION WITH SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIAN ROOTS SHOULD CAREFULLY CONSIDER THE “NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PAUL” In my denomination, the PCA, we are continually haunted by the sins of our racist Southern past. It has become an annual rite at General Assembly for the issue to be addressed one way or…
Recent debates over whether or not, “justification is central” to Paul’s theology have reminded me of a sermon I once heard by a Presbyterian seminary student. This African American student challenged his audience on the sin of racism and the ways it might manifest itself among us. Like any good…
In Charles Hodge’s 1853 article, “Idea of the Church,” his stated aim is to analyze the idea of the Church proposed in the Apostles’ Creed, in which, “the Church is declared to be “the Communion of the Saints.” He writes: The conception of the Church as the communion of saints…
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In his recently translated book on theology in a “Lutheran way,” Oswald Bayer emphasizes the element of pathos in theology: “The element of pathos in theology emphasizes that, in the presence of God ( coram Deo ), it is God himself who is active and that we are the passive…
Ex-Mormon Kenneth Anderson has some pointed things to say about Mormons in the December 24 issue of the Weekly Standard . He left the Mormons because “I found I could not continue to say I believed in a religion rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which…
Philippians 3:1-11 has been seen as a key anti-NPP text, emphasizing as it does the contrast between Paul’s zeal and his righteousness by law (v. 6) with the righteousness not of his own not derived from the law but a righteousness from God on the basis of faith (v. 9).…
As Watson goes on, he notes Dunn’s early and fundamental attacks on Sanders’s reading of Paul. Dunn argues that Sanders treats Paul as an un-Jewish theologian, rejecting not only covenant nomism but the whole apparatus of covenantal, biblical theology that the Jews built from. Dunn insists that Paul opposes covenant…
In the introduction to his book, Watson summarizes the thesis of his unpublished doctoral thesis, on which the published book is based. His initiating observation is that “in virtually every passage where the Reformation tradition has found an attack on ‘earning salvation,’ there is a reference to the exclusiveness of…
In his recently revised Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles , Francis Watson offers a pithy summary of the agenda of the New Perspective. Sanders, he says, extended the critique that G. F. Moore mounted in 1921 against German Lutheran scholarship on Judaism; Moore basically argued that German scholarship was systematizing…
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