Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Study in Biblical and Practical Theology Sunday School Notes / Epiphany 2004 Introductory Note: January 6 is Epiphany in the traditional church calendar. Though Epiphany is often treated as a single day, with the Sundays following counted as “Sundays after Epiphany,” we will treat Epiphany as an extended season.…
Imagine someone from another world trying to learn to live in our society according to our customs. What if someone gave him a check for a hundred dollars for his birthday–the first check he had ever seen in his life? Would he immediately understand how a check was used? Perhaps…
According to Presbyterian doctrine, as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, baptism is a baptized person’s “admission… into the visible church.” By referring to the “visible church,” the document makes clear it is referring to the present institutional Church with all her imperfections, as opposed to the future Church…
N. T. Wright claims that in the Apostle Paul’s writings “righteousness,” as it predicated of humans, denotes “covenant membership.” When he wrote this in the New Bible Dictionary edited by Sinclair Ferguson, J. I. Packer, and David Wright, no one thought this was too big a deal. However, when he…
It seems almost human nature to think that we can find something to do for God that will make Him do us favors. If we live more virtuously, or cut down on a vice or two, then God will have to reward us. But the problem with this notion is…
The First Commandment teaches us to trust in Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life. The First Commandment reads (I’m using NASB throughout): “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Obviously, trusting in someone or something else (even one’s own good works) for justification, sanctification, and eternal life”…
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Solomon’s prayer at the temple dedication (1 Kings 8) is a prayer about prayer. It’s a prayer that future prayers will be heard. His petitions take the form: “When Israel suffers from X, and turns to You in Your house, deliver them from X.” Solomon’s petitions for future petitions repeatedly…
A malar of Metz’s On the Liturgy , recently published in a handsome two-volume Latin-English edition in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents the kind of “mysteriological” piety against which modern liturgical scholars like Bouyer and Schmemann fulminated. For Amalar, every moment and movement of the liturgy symbolizes some event…
In a NYRB review of Justin Steinberg’s Dante and the Limits of Law , Robert Pogue Harrison pinpoints why the Comedy is so disquieting. Steinberg’s book shows how thoroughly the Comedy is indebted to medieval conceptions of law and punishment, and thus how much Dante’s poem is an effort to…
Dave Eggers’s latest novel takes its lengthy title from the prophet Zechariah: Your Fathers, where are they? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? The novel is inverted Kafka, as if K. had been able to tie down his interrogators and depose them. Thomas, a disturbed and disappointed young man,…
As Carlos Eire has documents ( War Against the Idols ), some Reformation iconoclasts were motivated by a spiritualizing piety that denied that God could be encountered in material things. Some, but not all. Some opposed images for precisely the opposite reasons. There is something of the spiritualizing tendency in…
Hosea 2 offers a lovely evocation of a new exodus and new covenant. After Yahweh threatens to destroy Israel’s vines and fig trees because she has prostituted herself with the Baal’s (2:9-13), He promises to lure her into the wilderness, take her to the vineyards where she will sing the…
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