Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
During one of my AAPC lectures I read a portion of Richard Mitchell’s provocative little book The Underground Grammarian . Here’s the portion I read: The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if…
This is the donation thank-you essay for January 2008. Our studies in the Psalms go out month by month in response to donations. I’m putting this one up here as an example, and also because the version I actually mailed out contained several egregious arithmetical errors! So, here is the…
Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of “traditional” or “canon” learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…
While “forgiving oneself” is widely accepted in the secular world as a legitimate and needful thing to do, Christians are rightly suspicious. After all, God is the one who forgives. When we sin against other people, we need to seek their forgiveness, not our own. Nevertheless after looking at Vine’s…
This was originally published as HIStory in the column, “A Pastor’s Perspective” in Ligonier Ministrie’s Tabletalk Magazine . I am not sure of the date but it was probably published in 1999 or 2000. Quick! What’s the basic message of the Bible? Summarize it in as few words as possible…
A Brief Explanation of What a Presbytery Is & Why Pastors in Presbyterian Denominations are Members of Them A belief in the primacy of the local congregation of the Church, I think, reflects the gut feeling of most North American Evangelicals. As a result, the form of Church government universally…
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In her recently-published Rituals of Spontaneity (Baylor), Lori Branch investigates the shift from ritual to emotional expression in liturgy, poetry, romance, consumer behavior from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She asks, “How and why did the popular conception of poetry shift from ritual recitation and communal performance to the…
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or,…
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or,…
Lundin sees a link between (some) Protestant hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, and the quest of the historical Jesus. The common factor is a search for a pure origin: “In the nineteenth century the quest for scriptural purity and origins assumed a number of guises. In some quarters, it became the drive to…
Thanks to Tim Enloe for getting me a copy of David Rankin’s 2004 article, “Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: The Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs” ( Vigiliae Christianae 58). He examines the way the terminology and orders of Roman society were imported into the church. As…
Problems of communication are often explained in terms of the inherent limitations of language. But this, of course, assumes that the mind’s thoughts are whole, complete, and comprehensive until they have the misfortune to issue into the cold nasty world in speech and writing. But this, of course, is just…
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