Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Book Review The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation & Evangelism by Norman Shepherd The Call of Grace is an excellent manual to put in the hands of laymen to teach them how to rest in God’s grace while taking seriously the prize of the upward call of…
My Role as a Parent in My Children’s Salvation Evangeline Jael Horne is our third child. My two boys were born while we were at seminary and we had the privilege of giving them to Jeff Meyers, our pastor at that time, for baptism. When Evangeline was born, however, I…
John Calvin writes in the Institutes about the possibility of admitting children to the Lord’s Supper by virtue of their baptism once and only once: At length they object, that there is not greater reason for admitting infants to baptism than to the Lord’s Supper, to which, however, they are…
The debate over paedocommunion does not seem to have made much headway on either side in recent years. Certainly both sides have made a solid effort to argue for their position. But no resolution seems to be forthcoming in the near future. As a convinced paedocommunionist, I find the church’s…
Lots of conservative Protestants want to answer “no” to this question. The problem with this position is that conservative Protestants are bound to believe what the Bible teaches. And the Bible says inconvenient things, like “baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3.21), or “all of you who were baptized into…
This paper is something of a follow-up to my earlier study, “ Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future .” One of the more controversial aspects of that paper was my claim that Calvin held to a very high view of baptismal efficacy. Indeed, he was a…
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What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple? Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to…
David Biale ( Blood and Belief ) argues that menstrual blood is not defiling because it is associated with death (as Jacob Milgrom, among others, argues). After all, menstrual blood doesn’t mean a woman is dying but that she is fertile. On the other hand, the sorts of bleeding that…
Durkheim said that “society” was the god to whom primitive peoples sacrificed, the totem standing in for the clan for which it served as totem. We might say, But of course. As FS Naiden ( Smoke Signals for the Gods , 277) has recently pointed out, by the time of…
John M. Lundquist argues that ancient temples were “associated with the realm of the dead, the underworld, the afterlife, the grave.” He states further: “The unifying feature here is the rites and worship of ancestors. The temple is the link between this world and the next. It has been called…
Paul says that everything that is in the light, everything that becomes visible, is light (Ephesians 5). He is writing about the light of the Father, Jesus, or the Spirit. If we are in that light, we ourselves become lights. But the claim is strictly true: Everything that the light…
John Lundquist claims that secrecy is one of the features of temples and temple rituals in the ancient world. All temples are sacred space, which means secret space, off-limits to any but the authorized. He cites Exodus 19:12-13, 21-24 in support. This is certainly true of ancient temples in general,…
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