54 articles from 34 issues, 1998 to 2026 · Page 2 of 5
B. B. Warfield called Calvin pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit. Burnett walks through what Calvin actually taught, why Presbyterians have argued about pneumatology ever since, and where the tradition's habits of thought still serve and where they leave gaps.
Working interviews Jennifer McNutt about her book Calvin Meets Voltaire, which traces the Geneva clergy who held the Reformed line through the Enlightenment. The Geneva pastors offer a longer view for any congregational leader feeling outnumbered by the cultural moment.
When Luther posted his theses, Calvin was eight. Small traces the road from a French schoolboy's eventual 'sudden conversion' through Geneva's vote to live by gospel and Word, to the day Calvin meant to spend one night in town and ended up shaping a movement instead.
Late medieval worship was overrun with what Calvin called theatrical trifles. Ray follows Calvin's polemic into its sources and stakes, and asks what 'theatrical' looks like in modern Reformed worship that has long since stopped policing itself by the standard Calvin set.
How did Calvin actually understand pastoral care? Willis works from Calvin's commentary on John 10, where Christ alone is the shepherd and human pastors serve only in a derivative sense, and shows what that subordination meant for the daily work of caring for souls.
Before the Reformation, Catholic worship had no congregational singing and no music in the language people actually spoke. Mills traces how Luther and Calvin recovered the song of the gathered people, and asks whether contemporary churches are quietly drifting back toward the silence the Reformers fought.
Calvin once wrote that he would gladly cross ten seas if it would help mend the church's torn body. Burnett puts that ferocity in conversation with Karl Barth, and asks what the two together have to say to a denomination tempted to treat division as routine.
Gibbons grew up Catholic in Scotland, considered the priesthood as a teenager, and never imagined he would one day preach at the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt where Luther had taken his vows. The piece is a personal Reformation memoir written from inside the surprise.
Ray picks up Julian of Norwich's Showings, reads it again, and finds soteriology buried in the oddities of her sentences. The piece is about what happens when a theological text actually does its work: the reader walks under an electric arch into a different world.
Hylton encouraged his congregation to mark the Reformation's 500th anniversary, then noticed that the popular media coverage focused mostly on Luther's failings. He pulls three pastoral insights from Luther's example, the kind that hold up regardless of what we think of his weaker moments.
Burnett's teacher George Lindbeck once told him the mainline church was dead and the only question was whether evangelicalism was the seven demons coming into the corpse. Twenty-five years later, Burnett asks whether either side of that bleak diagnosis still has anything theological to live on.
October 31, 1517: Luther nails ninety-five theological challenges to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world soon catches fire. Dawson tells the story of the question that haunted Luther for years before that morning, and the answer that, once found, set everything in motion.
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