Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The 2002 Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference and the Assurance of Grace Recently, there has been some controversy over the presentations of four speakers at the Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference. Accusations have been made including a denial of justification by faith alone and something close enough to “baptismal regeneration” that it…
Today, many in the Reformed world view a meritorious covenant of works as essential to a proper understanding of the gospel. These theologians believe that God set up a program in the Garden by which Adam would merit eternal life and blessing by his obedience. These same theologians usually regard…
After I graduated from college in 1989, I spent a summer in the Atlanta area in Georgia learning that I was not cut out for construction work. Then I met George Grant, one of my favorite authors. He was working for a church in South Florida in charge of their…
One meaning of “righteousness” in the Bible is moral uprightness. Perhaps a more basic meaning would be faithfulness. For example, Psalm 96.13 praises God, saying: He will judge the world in righteousness, And the peoples in faithfulness. In Hebrew poetry two lines often say the same thing using different words.…
I once saw “eschatology” defined as the study of edible French snails. But it really means the doctrine of the last things in Christian theology. In American Evangelical culture it is usually reduced to science fiction stories. But for the Apostle Paul it was actually the key to the Christian…
To understand the view of Nicholas Thomas Wright regarding Christ’s work of redemption, one must begin with the centrality of Adam to the plight of the human race. Anyone who has heard Wright’s lectures on Philippians will not be able to forget his haunting appeal to Genesis 5.3 as a…
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Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England . Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. “For sixteenth-century Catholics,” she writes,…
Calvin is harsher on allegorical interpretation than almost anyone, yet he is all in favor of typology. David, Zedekiah, Joseph, Aaron, Samson, Joshua, Zerubbabel, Cyrus and others are types of Christ. It is no easy task to discover where he draws the line between allegory and typology, though. At times,…
“Yahweh” is often thought to be a purely modern rendering of the Hebrew name, but Smalley finds a medieval glossator who writes the name as “Iahave.” She goes on: “The ‘monstrous form’ Jehoveh was already known to Christians in the late thirteenth century. Henry Crossy seems to compromise between Jehoveh…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Following Jewish exegetes of his time, Andrew of St. Victor interpreted Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Israel. Isaiah used the phrase “man of sorrows” to speak “of the people as though of one man.” “Bearing infirmities” refers to “the people who were to suffer in the Babylonian captivity” and…
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