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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostasy

Regeneration and Lettuce

My good friend, Jason Ewert, recently posted a review of Pastor Douglas Wilson’s book, Against the Church . Jason correctly notes that Pastor Wilson’s main pastoral motivation in writing this book is to combat dead orthodoxy. Dead orthodoxy is a real problem in Reformed churches that celebrate the primacy of…

by Garry VanderveenJuly 31, 2014
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Eucharist

Jesus Eats First

At the church I pastor, we have four servers who distribute the communion elements to the congregation, and I distribute the elements to those in the foyer and nursery. The servers and I do not partake of the bread and wine until the congregation is served first. As this has…

by Burke ShadeJuly 28, 2014
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Theopolis News

Church of the Present, Pastors of the Future

We at Trinity House believe that the church ought to raise and train her future pastors. Part of that training may be carried out by specialized institutions like Trinity House, but the church and her leaders are ultimately responsible for that training. To encourage churches to assume that responsibility, Trinity…

by Peter LeithartJuly 23, 2014
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Exodus

Mutilated Bodies

Sandra Jacobs's ​The Body as Property examines the role of physical disfigurement in the Hebrew Bible, with focus on the Torah, and more specifically on the (fictitious) Priestly document, P. After an introduction laying out a rationale for the comparative method that guides her research, she explores circumcision, the use…

by Peter LeithartJuly 23, 2014
Isaiah

Saving Judah

Yahweh saves. That’s what Isaiah’s name means, and that’s what Isaiah’s prophecy is about. Yah saves Judah when Aram and Israel pressure her. He saves Jerusalem from the Assyrian siege. He brings Judah back from the grave of Babylonian exile. But this triumphant message of Isaiah fizzles. The last few…

by Peter LeithartJuly 21, 2014
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Apostasy

Apostasy and Assurance

Are apostasy and assurance mutually exclusive? Some seem to think so. But let’s consider this a bit: No Reformed man would ever say that a man who is “saved” today will be safe forever no matter what . Rather we say, “your sins are forgiven, now, walk faithfully, glorify the…

by Steve WilkinsJuly 16, 2014

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Europe’s Jews

T he essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer…

February 9, 2015
Shakespeare

Buying Up the Bard

The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library: “During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics…

February 9, 2015

Age and Time

“One could say that age is to time what place is to space,” says Robert Pogue Harrison ( Juvenescence , 3), and he’s surprising that with all the attention given by philosophers to time, so few make the connection with age. Even Heidegger, who understood time as “a kind of…

February 6, 2015

Expanding Temple

First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone. By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent,…

February 6, 2015

Original Monotheism

Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God is largely an effort to rehabilitate the reputation and theory of Catholic linguist Wilhelm Schmidt, whose 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912-54) argued that monotheism was the original form of religious belief. As Corduan describes it, the “narrative behind the method” assumes that peoples…

February 6, 2015

Trinity, Tabernacle, and Mathematics

I confess. I’m a sucker for books on the Trinity, and for books on the tabernacle. When someone combines these two topics in a discussion of the foundations of mathematics, as Vern Poythress does in Redeeming Mathematics , I’m hooked. Poythress has been busy redeeming nearly everything recently - Science…

February 6, 2015

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