Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
Reformed and Presbyterian voices on theology, discipleship, and the church in our time.
In 1943 Princeton Theological Seminary required apologetics. The next year, it dropped from the curriculum entirely. Dembski traces how rational defense of the Christian faith, once taken for granted as a Christian duty, became theologically suspect, and what the seminary's loss has cost the church.
Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God argues that morality doesn't need God, an argument as old as Plato's Euthyphro. Smith reads Dworkin against the way religious believers actually think God relates to moral obligation, and finds the recurring secular case rests on a misunderstanding believers can clarify.
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.
Should we baptize infants or only believers? Sprinkle, pour, or immerse? Mills argues with James Torrance that the first question to ask isn't who or how, but what baptism actually does. The Reformed answer reorients the practical debates almost completely.
Christians are made to be different. Achtemeier follows that New Testament refrain into the abortion debate, arguing that the church's witness on the unborn is finally a sacramental one: people who live by the powers of the triune Lord cannot value human life on the world's terms.
The Bible doesn't supply a roadmap for Mideast policy, but it does offer a framework. Wisdom draws principles from the biblical story: God owns the land, the powerful tend to dominate the powerless, the people of God must act justly toward outsiders, and no political order can be trusted absolutely.
Church and CultureMiddle Eastern Christian minorities have a painful political history, and they've sometimes made the mess worse. Wisdom traces how Arab Christians moved between democratic statesmen like Charles Malik and the nationalist movements that ultimately failed to protect them, and what the record teaches about Christian political alliances.
Evangelical support for Israel is often dismissed as purely theological, a matter of obscure end-times prophecies. Wisdom argues there's plenty of evidence that doesn't require special revelation: a small minority people surviving repeated attempts at extermination is unique enough to read on the surface.
Christians who hold a high view of biblical inspiration are sometimes most tempted to wring policy prescriptions out of texts that weren't written for that purpose. Wisdom warns against the apocalyptic-prophecy approach to Mideast policy, and recovers a more sober use of Scripture for political discernment.
Anyone trying to understand the Middle East has to reckon with the fact that the events of the Bible took place there. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim spiritual descent from the same patch of ground. Wisdom unfolds what that overlapping inheritance has produced, and how Christians might think about it.
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