23 articles from 18 issues, 1997 to 2024 · Page 2 of 2
Partee opens with the wry observation that doctrine unites and reason divides, then surveys the rubble Reformed Christians have made of their own family identity. The piece is part lament, part invitation: an honest reckoning with what's been neglected and what still might be retrieved.
Burnett's teacher George Lindbeck once told him the mainline church was dead and the only question was whether evangelicalism was the seven demons coming into the corpse. Twenty-five years later, Burnett asks whether either side of that bleak diagnosis still has anything theological to live on.
The proclaimed Word is the load-bearing wall of Reformed worship. Gwinn watches Presbyterians shave minutes off the sermon for committee updates and musical responses, and asks what we are giving away when we treat preaching as a part of worship rather than as worship itself.
Hughes Oliphant Old died in May 2016 at age eighty-three, leaving behind decades of scholarship that shaped Reformed worship across denominational lines. Taylor's tribute traces what Old taught us about how worship has actually been done, and what we lose if his books gather dust.
Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda gets translated as 'the church reformed, always reforming,' but the original Latin has more bite than that. Bush traces the saying's actual provenance and argues the Reformed tradition's understanding of reform is more disciplined, and more demanding, than the slogan suggests.
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.
Why read J. Gresham Machen today, long after the fundamentalist controversy? Darryl G. Hart traces his life and argues that Machen’s view of the church as a doctrinal, voluntary and otherworldly body speaks to Presbyterians living in a post-Christian culture.
Why were prophets, priests and kings anointed, and what does that have to do with Jesus’ baptism? Randall Otto argues that Jesus’ baptism served his threefold office, and that Christians share each of those callings when they are baptized.
Why should Presbyterians study their confessions at all? Theresa Froehlich gives three reasons, identity, historicity and authenticity, and shows how the confessions stand under Scripture while drawing the circle of the Reformed faith.
Is a troubled denomination worth the effort of keeping it going? Julius Poppinga likens the PCUSA to the aging Mir space station and lists seven reasons, from its Reformed heritage to its ties with churches overseas, for staying and working for faithfulness.
Does the Reformed doctrine of a Father punishing his Son teach us to be violent? Richard Mouw concedes that Calvinists have often been harsh, then argues that the tradition’s limits on violence and its once-for-all view of the Cross guard against any such link.
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