Dearman reads the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles as the Old Testament's primary picture of corporate failure, and as the matrix N.T. Wright says shaped Jesus' announcement of the kingdom. The PCUSA's own systemic failures put us in conversation with that text from the inside.
How did the New Testament come to be a single collection of twenty-seven books, distinct from everything else early Christians read? F. F. Bruce examines what historical research can show about the canon's emergence, alongside the historic Christian belief that the Spirit who inspired the books also gathered them.
Metzger walks through the influences that quietly shaped the New Testament canon: which books circulated, which got read aloud in worship, which got cited as Scripture by the Fathers. The story is one of the most important developments in early Christian thought, and history is largely silent about it.
Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown have made the New Testament canon a contested question again, presenting it as a top-down decree imposed on the early church. Hobson goes back to the actual history and shows that councils didn't decide the canon; they recognized what had already become Scripture by use.
How do we know the Bible we hold is the Bible that was written? Josh McDowell sets out ten ways Scripture stands apart from other books, traces how the Old and New Testament texts were copied and kept, and asks what inspiration means.
1 Corinthians 11 has supplied 'regimental colors' for centuries of arguments about women in worship. Bailey reads the passage in its larger literary context (1 Cor 11-14 as a single essay) and offers a careful answer to what Paul actually meant when he addressed women's prayer and prophecy.
Bailey brings thirty-five years of work on 1 Corinthians to bear on chapter 6's strenuous teaching about sexual practice. Paul wrote the letter for the Corinthians and for everyone everywhere on whom Christ's name is called, and the early church through Calvin agreed: he meant exactly what he said.
Why does the Bible, and not Christian experience, stand at the center of the faith? In a chapter from Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen argues that the gospel rests on an event, that Scripture records it truly, and that liberalism puts human experience in its place.
What does it mean to be an ambassador for Christ when a denomination changes its ordination standards? Mark Atkinson works through 2 Corinthians 5 and 6 and argues that the church speaks for its sending authority and makes no policy of its own.
What does 1 Samuel say to a church in a bleak season? James Edwards reads Israel’s low point under Eli and finds a small, steady lamp that has not gone out, the sign that God is still in the story and still at work.
Why does God let false teachers trouble his church at all? Opening a new regular feature, the Board turns to Calvin on 2 Peter: the turmoil shows whether we truly love God, and it asks whether we share the Father’s heart for the lost.
Why do the Ten Commandments still matter 3,500 years after Sinai? Susan Cyre reads them as the words of a husband to his bride, set within God’s marriage covenant with Israel and Christ’s with the church, and shows how each Word shapes the way a wife responds to her Lord.