Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
Reformed and Presbyterian voices on theology, discipleship, and the church in our time.
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.
Pastors run spiritual formation programs without often pausing to ask what 'spirit' actually means. Vanhoozer treats that question as a load-bearing one for ministry: what we think the human spirit is shapes everything we do to form it. He follows the biblical words to a working answer.
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.
Ray opens with a Boy Scout sea voyage to Austria as a fifteen-year-old, the moment a curious kid first met big questions. The address builds from that memory toward an invitation: theology as combat in the best sense, the place where serious questions actually get fought through.
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.
Church and CultureBruce Metzger's previously unpublished 1984 Princeton address on the theological stakes of inclusive language in Bible translation, published here for the first time. Translation always trades against itself, Metzger argues, and the trades around gender language are no exception.
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.
Forty years into ministry, Bullock offers six observations about how Presbyterians have trained their pastors and where the model has thinned out. Stewardship of time, the witness of unlikely converts, and the irreplaceability of mentors all show up on his list.
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