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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Time exists, argues Lee Smolin Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe . Space, though - space is secondary, an emergent property, a manifestation of some deeper reality. What might that be? In his NYRB review of Smolin’s book, James Gleick anwers: “For space,…
Before the Federal Vision, there was the Norman Shepherd controversy, which shook Westminster Seminary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though repeatedly exonerated, Shepherd was ultimately dismissed for the good of the seminary. It was a convoluted and intensely personal and political battle, and fortunately we now have Ian…
When the Presbyterian General Assembly determined that Catholic baptism was not valid, Charles Hodge was “overwhelmed.” He was sure it was an anomaly, and that most Presbyterians would not believe that Catholics “lived and died unbaptized,” since such a position was “in opposition to all previous practice, and to the…
Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 is intended as a monument to members of his family, and to the 30 million others, who died in Mao’s famine. The famine left horrors in its wake: “Some villages transported corpses by the truckload for burial in common graves. In villages…
World War II didn’t end when World War II ended, Keith Lowe shows in his numbing Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II . Instead of concentrating on the European miracle of recovery, he focuses on “the period before such attempts at rehabilitation were even a possibility,…
Ma Jian reports in the NYT today about the inequities and brutalities of China’s self-imposed genocide. Wealthy Chinese circumvent the one-child policy with comparative ease. Not so the poor in the many villages of China: “Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of…
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