Why Study Theology?
What is doctrine for? Seminarian Jonathan Sundermeier turns to Calvin’s Institutes to argue that theology’s highest end is piety: reverent love of God that is formed by knowing him and issues in joyful obedience.
Tag
Calvin & Reformed Tradition
90 articles from 62 issues, 1995 to 2026
Holiness
St. Christina the Astonishing tried to flee the stench of sinners; Isaiah collapsed in terror before the Holy One. Sara Jane Nixon argues that the content of God’s holiness is love, a holiness that draws near to sinners rather than away from them.
Orthodoxy
Right belief or right worship? Doctrine or doxology? Drawing on Chesterton, Athanasius, and Calvin, Richard Burnett presents orthodoxy as a costly, moving equilibrium, never stuffy and never still, that has carried the church through every storm.
Perseverance
Spiritual autobiographies remind us how the Spirit sustains faith through the long road. Drawing on Schweitzer, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Douglas F. Fletcher names ten weapons against evil and reflects on perseverance as a gift God himself secures.
The Greatest Love Story Ever Lived
Cyre traces the wedding scene that runs from Eden through the prophets to Revelation: the Father giving his Bride to the Son, Christ vowing eternal faithfulness to his Church. Every human marriage is an echo of that union, and our identity flows from being part of it.
Law and Liturgy The Place of the Ten Commandments in Reformed Worship
The Ten Commandments aren't just a moral code; in Reformed worship they sit at the foundation of the service itself. Dorn traces how Bucer and Calvin built liturgies around them, and asks whether contemporary congregations have lost something by quietly setting them aside.
Reformed Accents
What makes a Reformed church Reformed? Small begins with Peter DeVries's wry novelistic portrait of a Calvinist boyhood and works toward a serious answer: shared Protestant emphases, yes, but with distinctive accents on Scripture, election, the priesthood of all believers, and worship as covenant response.
Why Tradition?
American culture treats the past as a burden to leave behind. Small argues the Reformed tradition does the opposite: it carries Calvin and the confessions forward not because they're old, but because they witness to a gospel the present urgently needs to hear.
Pastoral Ministry and Scholarship
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.
Characteristics of Reformed Theology
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.
Spiritual Friendship – The Evangelical Brotherhood in Colonial America
Princeton was founded in 1746 by a group of Presbyterian clergy and laymen bound together by what they called spiritual friendship. Longfield traces that brotherhood through Belcher and Edwards into the eighteenth-century awakening, and asks what kept the network theologically coherent across distance and time.
John Owen on the Beatific Vision – Historic Reformed “Spirituality” in Action
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.