Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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I have a review of Douglas Farrow’s Ascension Theology at the Trinity House site today .
In their Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible , John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno make illuminating comparisons between the function of the patristic “rule of faith” and the use of hypotheses in modern science. Augustine says that whatever in Scripture doesn’t conduce to love…
In his contribution to A History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1: The Ancient Period (328), Joseph Trigg points to the grammatical origins of Irenaeus’s understanding of the rule of faith: “he relies on concepts take from Greco-Roman literary studies, the field known in Antiquity as ‘grammar’ and taught as part…
Francis was a great grammatician of gratitude. So, according to Chesterton, was Chaucer: “He is as awakening as a cool wind on a hot day, because he breathes forth something that has fallen into great neglect in our time, something that very seldom stirs the stuffy atmosphere of self-satisfaction or…
Chesterton, Ker says ( G. K. Chesterton: A Biography ), recognized that playing with children is like “wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils.” It requires “principles of the highest morality,” to decide, for instance, “before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a…
In his biography of G. K. Chesterton , Ian Ker summarizes Chesterton’s analysis of Francis’s praise of creation: “Francis’s ‘great gratitude’ for existence was not just a feeling or sentiment: it was ‘the very rock of reality,’ besides which ‘all facts’ were ‘fancies.’ This was ‘the fundamental fact which we…
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