Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
A hundred years on, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism still outsells most seminary faculties combined. Burnett examines what Machen actually meant by 'liberalism,' how that target has shifted since 1923, and why the book still feels uncomfortably current to readers on both sides of the line he drew.
Why insist that pastors be trained as scholars? La Montagne separates the Reformed tradition's actual answer from the modern research-university definition that's quietly replaced it, and shows how the original conception still serves congregations better than the institutional one.
Bullinger's Decades sat alongside Calvin's Institutes as a foundational statement of Reformed theology in the sixteenth century. Slemmons offers Bullinger's own short summary in English for the first time, a fifty-article distillation of what every Christian should know.
John Leith spent his career teaching Reformed theology and rarely tried to summarize it. Republished from a new collection of his writings, this essay is his bold attempt to name what is most basic about the tradition: a theology of the catholic church, anchored in Scripture and confession.
John Owen has become a stick used to beat people, his name shorthand for whatever kind of Reformed Christian someone wants to oppose. McDonald sets the polemics aside and reads Owen on the beatific vision, recovering a Reformed spirituality that has more to give the present than its caricatures suggest.
The Reformation was as much a reform of spirituality as of theology. Old shows how Protestants moved devotion out of the cloister and into the workshop, the kitchen, the field, treating the whole of ordinary life as the place where Christians live before God.
When did you last think about the beatific vision? Most Protestants haven't, leaving the topic to Roman Catholics. McDonald argues we lose something important when we cede it: the destination of salvation itself, the unmediated sight of the Triune God in whose face we will at last be at home.
TheologyWhat does humility have to do with teaching the Bible? Bryant argues: everything. The breadth and mystery of Scripture, the humility of God's self-revelation in Christ, and the limits of every interpreter all push against confident overreach in the classroom and the pulpit alike.
Today's classrooms aim to feel safe. Neder argues theology classrooms must do more than that. Christian theology is an encounter with the living God, and a class that never disturbs anyone is teaching about a different subject than the one its name says.
TheologyIf we could time-travel to first-century Galilee and look for Jesus, what would we find? Edwards uses the thought experiment to trace the leap from a small itinerant Jewish movement to the church Ignatius wrote to seventy years later, and what survived intact in the transition.
Part two of Edwards's two-part essay on the early church's startling decision to give Jesus the most sacred name for God. This installment takes up the precedent in YHWH's own self-revelation that made the move thinkable for Jewish monotheists.
TheologyThe earliest Greek title for Jesus was 'Lord' (kyrios), the same word the Septuagint used for YHWH. Edwards asks how Jewish monotheists could have applied the divine name to a Galilean rabbi, and what precedent for that move they found in the Old Testament itself.
Theology Matters is sent free in print to anyone who requests it, sustained primarily by readers like you. Tax-deductible.
Give a Gift