Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Rounding Out the Traditional Doctrine of Justification Justification and the Church The traditional Protestant doctrine of justification fails to fully hold together the soteriological (forgiveness of sins) and the ecclesiological (covenant membership). This is part of a larger problem, of course, namely, the dichotomizing of church and salvation. Biblically and…
John Piper’s book, Counted Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002) is, from any perspective, a passionate work. Nevertheless, I find I need to disagree with parts of it. The reason I do this is not because John Piper’s book does…
What follows is a handout for a Sunday School class I have taught recently at my church . Presbyterian doctrine teaches what the Bible says about God sovereign control over history and his unconditional choice (election) to bring some people to everlasting glory while allowing others to remain in unbelief…
“Covenantal Nomism” sounds like a description of tiny contract-loving creatures who live underground. But it is actually a recent term used to describe the pattern of religious belief and practice in first-century Palestinian Judaism. The idea is that God graciously establishes a structured relationship based on promises, a “covenant,” with…
What follows deals primarily with two essays, one by Dr. Douglas Kelly and the other by The Rev. Richard Phillips . My reason for writing this essay is that many people are confidently saying things about N. T. Wright that I believe are contrary to fact. I choose Dr. Kelly…
The Bible is often treated as a book of rules with directions for living. To some extent, that is true; but it is neither the whole truth nor the most important truth about the book. Ultimately, the Bible is a story about God and man and their reconciliation in Christ.…
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Frank Ninkovich’s The Global Republic minimizes the role of “Manifest Destiny” and the belief in American exceptionalism in the global rise of the United States. Instead, “the stimulus for the nation’s ascent to dizzying heights of power, far from emanating from within, was . . . of external origin, an…
A young Jane Fonda stares at you from the cover of Michel Pastoureau’s latest, Green: The History of a Color . She wears a dull brown-and-green tartan dress and leans back against the arm of a green sofa, large green-covered books discarded to one side. She’s smoking, but she’s taken…
In his contribution to Advancing Trinitarian Theology , Stephen Holmes defends the classic notion of divine simplicity, that God’s operations ad extra are undivided. Divine actions, he argues, arise from the eternal relations of origin within the Trinity: “Son and Spirit have a movement from an origin in their eternal…
An alert former student, Stephen Long, corrects my claim that the OT uses “X knew his wife” in only two places. In addition to Genesis 4 and 1 Samuel 1, there’s Genesis 38:26, where Judah “did not know” his daughter-in-law Tamar again. Long writes, “On the one hand, its existence…
I summarize and discuss Adam Kotsko’s socio-cultural version of Christus Victor atonement theology at the Trinity House site .
Calvin quotes Augustine’s Tractates on John ( Institutes 2.16.4) in summarizing God’s motive in sending the Son: “God’s love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he has loved us…
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