14 articles from 13 issues, 1995 to 2026
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.
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.
The 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.
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.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Robert Mills follows the question from the Greeks through Kant and postmodernism, then argues that Scripture ties beauty to the glory of God, with consequences for the Church’s worship and witness.
Is “Father” a name or an image? Andrew Purves and Charles Partee answer a Presbyterian study paper on the Trinity by arguing that God names himself, so the name cannot be treated as one metaphor among many.
Why does the Catechism speak of God’s anger before it names a Redeemer? Stephen Eyre argues that the love of God and his anger go hand in hand, and that our hope rests on a Savior who is truly God and truly human.
Does it matter if the church stops naming the first person of the Trinity? Gerrit Dawson traces the pastoral, feminist, pro-abortion and pro-gay pressures behind the loss of “Father,” and argues from Scripture and the fathers that the name is a gift to keep.
If creation is only the product of a mindless process, who is Lord? Susan Cyre argues that the church cannot confess God as Creator and also accept a purely natural account of origins, because what is at stake is who stands at the center of the universe.
What does it mean to call the PC(USA) Reformed if its doctrine of God can be reinvented? Theresa Ip Froehlich reads the Book of Order and the confessions to show a God who stays the same from Scripture to the creeds to the church’s constitution.
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.
Why would a loving God allow pain? James Edwards works through C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain and argues that tribulation is the terrible necessity by which God draws a rebel will out of self-sufficiency and back to himself.
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