Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The 2002 Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference and the Assurance of Grace Recently, there has been some controversy over the presentations of four speakers at the Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference. Accusations have been made including a denial of justification by faith alone and something close enough to “baptismal regeneration” that it…
Today, many in the Reformed world view a meritorious covenant of works as essential to a proper understanding of the gospel. These theologians believe that God set up a program in the Garden by which Adam would merit eternal life and blessing by his obedience. These same theologians usually regard…
After I graduated from college in 1989, I spent a summer in the Atlanta area in Georgia learning that I was not cut out for construction work. Then I met George Grant, one of my favorite authors. He was working for a church in South Florida in charge of their…
One meaning of “righteousness” in the Bible is moral uprightness. Perhaps a more basic meaning would be faithfulness. For example, Psalm 96.13 praises God, saying: He will judge the world in righteousness, And the peoples in faithfulness. In Hebrew poetry two lines often say the same thing using different words.…
I once saw “eschatology” defined as the study of edible French snails. But it really means the doctrine of the last things in Christian theology. In American Evangelical culture it is usually reduced to science fiction stories. But for the Apostle Paul it was actually the key to the Christian…
To understand the view of Nicholas Thomas Wright regarding Christ’s work of redemption, one must begin with the centrality of Adam to the plight of the human race. Anyone who has heard Wright’s lectures on Philippians will not be able to forget his haunting appeal to Genesis 5.3 as a…
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Isaiah 56 begins with an exhortation concerning justice. In parallel phrases, Yahweh instructs Israel to “guard judgment” ( mishpat ) and to “do justice” ( zedaqah ). Along with God’s statutes and commandments, His judgments are to by guarded (Leviticus 18:5, 28; 25:18). “Guarding” judgment suggests a conservative, protective, preserving…
What’s The Trouble With Physics ? asks Lee Smolin. The answer has something to do with the absence of diversity within the scientific community (xxii): “Science requires a delicate balance between conformity and variety. Because it is so easy to fool ourselves, because the answers are unknown, experts, no matter…
According to Robert Sparling’s account in Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (145), Moses Mendelssohn considered human beings to be isolated individuals. Language is a tool used by these isolated individuals to connect concepts in our head to things in the world. Speech involves assembling little bundles of signs…
Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is largely a defense of definite atonement against the hypothetical universalists of his day (see Jonathan Moore’s English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology ). Owen argues that there is an inseparable connection between Christ’s death…
I am not convinced by the texts Owen cites in defense of the notion of a “covenant of redemption,” a “compact” between Father and Son “concerning the work to be undertaken, and the issue or event thereof” ( The Death of Death in the Death of Christ ). But the…
Means are designed to serve ends, and John Owen ( The Death of Death in the Death of Christ ) says that the means are of two sorts. Some are good in themselves without any reference to the means. Others “have no good at all in any kind, as in…
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