19 articles from 15 issues, 1995 to 2020
Ephesians 2 says Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, in the present perfect tense: it was done, and it remains done. Goodloe asks why the church so often acts as if the work were still pending, and what it means to live as those for whom reconciliation is already accomplished.
War is hell, but coming home is its own hell. Tietje, a chaplain to combat veterans, listens to soldiers without a narrative for what they've lived, and finds in Holy Saturday the strange grace that the gospel has already descended into the hell of being lost.
Andrews preaches 2 Corinthians 5 to the 222nd General Assembly: from now on we regard no one from a human point of view. The vertical reconciliation God has accomplished in Christ creates and shapes every horizontal one. A sermon for a denomination tempted to invert the order.
John Spong rejects monotheism, the incarnation, the Trinity, and the atonement, then claims to be a Christian. Cyre asks what content actually distinguishes Christian faith from anything else, and walks through Paul, Athanasius, and the Reformers for the kind of answer Spong's question demands.
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 makes a good soldier of Christ? In his last sermon at Princeton, J. Gresham Machen tells seminary students that Paul could fight because he was at peace with God, and that only the Cross gives that peace.
If there is more than one way to God, why would God send his Son to die? Edward A. Kazmarek tells the true story of a sixteen-year-old panelist at an Atlanta Christian school whose plain question a visiting theologian never answered.
What happens when a church quietly trades the Second Article of the Creed for the First? James Edwards argues that a theology of creation is displacing a theology of redemption, names four causes, and points to the cross as the way back to shore.
If you cannot tell which Christ people mean, how do you tell which gospel they preach? Theresa Ip Froehlich turns to the Reformed confessions and finds the atonement is the test, an exchange that is eternal, exclusive, exact, substitutionary, necessary and purposeful.
What becomes of the holiness of God in a culture that has traded virtue for therapy? David Wells argues that churches now prize wholeness over holiness, and that grace and the Cross lose their meaning once the Holy One drops out of sight.
Can a children’s catechism be warm and still leave out sin? Stephen Eyre reads the PCUSA’s proposed First Catechism beside the Heidelberg and the Shorter Catechism and finds that its loving tone comes without a moral dimension, a clear atonement or the Word of God.
What does Christ do for us that we cannot do for ourselves? Andrew Purves argues that Christ’s priesthood, in which he gives God the faithful response we cannot, is the practical center of the Gospel, and that modern Protestantism has all but forgotten it.
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