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# Theology Matters: Biblical. Reformed. Evangelical. Thought-Provoking.

## Sitemaps
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## Posts
- [Holiness](https://theologymatters.com/articles/holiness-2026-winter/): 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](https://theologymatters.com/articles/orthodoxy-2026-winter/): 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](https://theologymatters.com/articles/perseverance-2026-winter/): 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 Nicene Creed in Historical Context](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-nicene-creed-in-historical-context/): Why did Constantine summon the bishops to Nicaea, and how did the church remember the moment afterward? Andrews traces the council through the eyes of Eusebius and Theodoret, the historians who first preserved its witness for the centuries that followed.
- [The Nicene Creed Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-nicene-creed-today-yesterday-and-tomorrow/): The Council of Nicaea was 1,700 years ago, but Small argues its disputes still live in pews and pulpits unrecognized. He examines what the Creed affirms and what it refuses to believe, drawing on Barth and Christopher Morse to recover the necessity of confessing both.
- [A Devotional Reflection on George Herbert’s Poem, Love III](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-devotional-reflection-on-george-herberts-poem-love-iii/): Herbert's most famous poem stages a soul drawing back from divine love and the patient persistence with which Love draws it forward anyway. McDonald reads the poem alongside Herbert's pastoral writings, finding the same Reformed conviction running through both: only refusal can shut us out.
- [The Greatest Love Story Ever Lived](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [Where Has All the Romance Gone? And Where It Can Still Be Found](https://theologymatters.com/articles/where-has-all-the-romance-gone-and-where-it-can-still-be-found/): Gen Z talks about romance as an unbearable rulebook crushing them. Kosari hears the same paralysis in our churches, where marriage has become an idol no one can quite picture. She turns to Isaiah 52, where the Lord woos his Jerusalem out of captivity, for a different vision.
- [Provisional Advice on the New Constitutional Amendments](https://theologymatters.com/articles/provisional-advice-on-the-new-constitutional-amendments/): The PCUSA constitution added two new categories this year and a new examination requirement that's already baffling presbyteries. Andrews offers pastoral guidance for sessions and committees on what's actually changed, what hasn't, and how to act faithfully without either overreach or quiet capitulation.
- [Law and Liturgy The Place of the Ten Commandments in Reformed Worship](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [God Has Spoken](https://theologymatters.com/articles/god-has-spoken/): Reprinted from a 1950 volume, this essay insists the Bible's whole message reduces to one staggering claim: God has spoken. The author argues that making this book truly known to people of our time is not merely a religious task but the supreme cultural one.
- [Gender, Sex, and the Kingdom](https://theologymatters.com/articles/gender-sex-and-the-kingdom/): The Standing Theological Committee of ECO presents an eschatological account of gender and sexuality: not a backward-looking standard, but the new creation Christ is making. Rooted in Revelation 21, the document calls women and men forward into the kingdom rather than into longing or regret.
- [Freedom for the Gospel, Freedom from Worldly Ideologies: The Barmen Declaration Today](https://theologymatters.com/articles/freedom-for-the-gospel-freedom-from-worldly-ideologies-the-barmen-declaration-today/): Burgess opens with a year he spent at an East Berlin seminary in the 1980s, when Marxism-Leninism claimed total interpretive authority. Forty years later, he hears the Barmen Declaration's refusal of competing 'lords' speaking again to a church tempted by every ideology offering easier answers than Christ.
- [Living East of Eden – Pastoral Reflections on How Theology Matters](https://theologymatters.com/articles/living-east-of-eden-pastoral-reflections-on-how-theology-matters/): Miller takes Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi as the question that follows every pastor home: who do you say that I am? A conference address mixing personal story with theological seriousness, reflecting on living and ministering east of Eden, between hell's gates and the keys of the kingdom.
- [Learning to Say No For the Sake of God’s Yes](https://theologymatters.com/articles/learning-to-say-no-for-the-sake-of-gods-yes/): From Mark 2, Burnett walks through Christ's habit of dining with sinners and tax collectors. What does the divine yes to the wrong people require us to refuse? Especially now, in a moment when the church most wants to say yes to everything.
- [A Firm Foundation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-firm-foundation/): A sermon on Matthew 16, where Peter recognizes Jesus as the Christ. Small preaches against the language of dying churches, hearing in Christ's promise to Peter the foundation that no rate of decline can shake: the gates of hell will not prevail against the church Christ is building.
- [For the Next Generation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/for-the-next-generation/): At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a meditation on identity, ministry, and what we hope to leave the generation that follows.
- [The Foundation of Our Calling](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-foundation-of-our-calling/): Burnett opens Ephesians 1 and finds Paul piling blessing on blessing: chosen before the foundation of the world, predestined in love, sealed for an inheritance. The piece sits with the dizzying generosity of Paul's grammar and asks what it means that our calling is grounded that deep.
- [Preparing to Vote on the Amendments](https://theologymatters.com/articles/preparing-to-vote-on-the-amendments/): Two PCUSA amendments are heading to presbyteries for ratification, and Andrews lays out exactly what they say, what they don't say, and what's at stake. Drawing on his father's prayer that he be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove, he urges presbyters to be both.
- [Shall God Alone Remain Lord of the Conscience?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/shall-god-alone-remain-lord-of-the-conscience/): The Westminster Confession is unambiguous: God alone is Lord of the conscience. Goodloe shows how the Olympia Presbytery's overture to the 2024 General Assembly threatens that bedrock principle, and why every Presbyterian, whatever their view on the underlying issues, has reason to defend it.
- [What Happened at GA226: Where Will the Boundaries Be?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-happened-at-ga226-where-will-the-boundaries-be/): Nixon walks through what actually happened with POL-01 (the Olympia Overture) at the 2024 General Assembly, why the split-vote outcome is more ambiguous than either side claims, and what congregations and sessions need to think about as the amendments now move to the presbyteries.
- [Reformed Accents](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [The Yoke That Bears Us Up](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-yoke-that-bears-us-up/): Why come to Jesus rather than to the certified teachers of the law? Bartow preaches Matthew 11's invitation to take Christ's yoke as the answer to a question Israel had been asking for generations: where, exactly, do we go to find rest for our souls?
- [“Live Not By Lies”](https://theologymatters.com/articles/live-not-by-lies/): Ninety years ago a small group of pastors and elders in Barmen refused the Nazis' attempt to colonize the gospel. Working revisits Karl Barth's text and finds a confession that still names the temptation: any blood-and-soil ideology that asks the church to add another word to the one Word of God.
- [Keeping Our Vows: A Pledge of Presbyterian Officers](https://theologymatters.com/articles/keeping-our-vows-a-pledge-of-presbyterian-officers/): Theology Matters joins a public pledge for Presbyterian officers facing an overture that would compel them to affirm what they do not believe. Reading like an open letter, the piece calls clergy and elders alike to stand on the historic doctrines of creation and redemption rather than yield.
- [“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”](https://theologymatters.com/articles/shall-the-fundamentalists-win/): A century ago Harry Emerson Fosdick stood in a New York Presbyterian pulpit and preached against ordination standards he considered illiberal. Burnett returns to that famous sermon for its centennial, asking what it set in motion, what it cost, and what it still tells us about American Christianity.
- [The Grace of Theological Friendships: Augustine](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-grace-of-theological-friendships-augustine/): Augustine is loved for the introspective Confessions, but Andrews argues he was never alone. This chapter follows Augustine's circle in Hippo, his theology of friendship, and the sometimes-uncomfortable question it puts to pastors today: who walks with you, and what are you actually accountable to one another for?
- [Why Tradition?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [Christianity and Liberalism – A Centennial Review](https://theologymatters.com/articles/christianity-and-liberalism-a-centennial-review/): A hundred years on, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism still outsells most seminary faculties combined. Burnett examines what Machen actually meant by 'liberalism,' how that target has shifted since 1923, and why the book still feels uncomfortably current to readers on both sides of the line he drew.
- [Encouragement for the Journey](https://theologymatters.com/articles/encouragement-for-the-journey/): Parish ministry is one of the most demanding journeys a person can take. Ray writes to encourage those discerning the call, and the older ministers who tend them, with a reminder that the calling is never private: it is always the church's gift to one of its own.
- [Pastoral Ministry and Scholarship](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [The Confession that the PCUSA Needs](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-confession-that-the-pcusa-needs/): Burgess responds to the 225th General Assembly's call for a new PCUSA confession of faith with a different proposal: confess our present inability to make a common confession, and clarify what we would confess if we could. A serious work-around for a denomination at an impasse.
- [Moses, Death, and the Continuation of Ministry](https://theologymatters.com/articles/moses-death-and-the-continuation-of-ministry/): The Pentateuch ends with Moses dying outside the promised land. Dearman reads that anticlimax theologically, finding in it a pattern: ministry passes from one hand to another, the work continues without us, and the inheritance belongs to those who come next, all by God's design.
- [What All Christians Should Know](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-all-christians-should-know/): Bullinger's Decades sat alongside Calvin's Institutes as a foundational statement of Reformed theology in the sixteenth century. Slemmons offers Bullinger's own short summary in English for the first time, a fifty-article distillation of what every Christian should know.
- [Characteristics of Reformed Theology](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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](https://theologymatters.com/articles/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.
- [“That’s The Spirit!” Or, What Exactly Does Spiritual Formation Form?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/thats-the-spirit-or-what-exactly-does-spiritual-formation-form/): 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.
- [What is Reformed Spirituality?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-is-reformed-spirituality/): 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.
- [John Owen and the Beatific Vision](https://theologymatters.com/articles/john-owen-and-the-beatific-vision/): 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.
- [Humility as a Reformed Value](https://theologymatters.com/articles/humility-as-a-reformed-value/): What 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.
- [Theology as a Way of Life](https://theologymatters.com/articles/theology-as-a-way-of-life/): 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.
- [An Invitation to Combat](https://theologymatters.com/articles/an-invitation-to-combat/): 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.
- [From Christ to Christianity](https://theologymatters.com/articles/from-christ-to-christianity/): If 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.
- [Theological Implications of Inclusive Language in Biblical Translation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/theological-implications-of-inclusive-language-in-biblical-translation/): Bruce 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.
- [Lord God and Lord Jesus – Part 2](https://theologymatters.com/articles/lord-god-and-lord-jesus-2/): 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.
- [Lord God and Lord Jesus – Part 1](https://theologymatters.com/articles/lord-god-and-lord-jesus-1/): 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.
- [Six Observations about Presbyterian Theological Education: The View from My Window](https://theologymatters.com/articles/six-observations-about-presbyterian-theological-education-the-view-from-my-window/): 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.
- [Why and How Theology Matters](https://theologymatters.com/articles/why-and-how-theology-matters/): If the church's calling is to be stewards of the mysteries of God, theology is the work that keeps us trustworthy with what's been entrusted. Small unfolds Paul's image and asks what theological stewardship looks like in session meetings, confirmation classes, and Sunday worship.
- [Struggling to “Live Not by Lies”](https://theologymatters.com/articles/struggling-to-live-not-by-lies/): Crocco listens to a psychiatrist friend who can't say what she actually thinks about gender dysphoria treatment without losing her license. The conversation pulls Solzhenitsyn's plea to 'live not by lies' from the Soviet bloc into our own moment, and asks what costs Christians should expect.
- [Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity](https://theologymatters.com/articles/overcoming-the-juvenilization-of-american-christianity/): Bergler's earlier book diagnosed how American churches absorbed the values of adolescence; this follow-up asks what maturity looks like and how congregations get there. Offered as an introduction to From Here to Maturity, with the editor's recommendation to read both volumes.
- [A Surprising Hope: Barren Wombs and Unexpected Fruitfulness](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-surprising-hope-barren-wombs-and-unexpected-fruitfulness/): Billings preaches the biblical pattern of barren wombs becoming the very means by which God brings forth promise, from Sarah through Hannah to Elizabeth. A talk about waiting, hope, and the kind of fruitfulness that resists every category we try to put around it.
- [Running to the Sound of Gunfire](https://theologymatters.com/articles/running-to-the-sound-of-gunfire/): A 2021 conference address from Stephen Crocco on the courage Christians need to run toward the difficult places rather than away. The metaphor is military, the application is pastoral, and the audience is Reformed believers wondering whether to keep speaking at all.
- [Why We Exist](https://theologymatters.com/articles/why-we-exist/): A conference talk from Lorenzo Small on the church's reason for being. Not its programs, not its buildings, not its institutional momentum, but the underlying calling that holds every congregation accountable: the gospel its existence is meant to bear witness to.
- [The Church in Exile: Recovering a Reformed View of the Displaced Community](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-church-in-exile-recovering-a-reformed-view-of-the-displaced-community/): Western Christianity is increasingly described as a community in exile. McNutt asks what the Reformed tradition has to teach a displaced church, drawing on a tradition that has known persecution, dispersion, and the long discipline of being a minority before.
- [Theology Matters Conference 2021 – Opening Worship & Sermon](https://theologymatters.com/articles/opening-worship-sermon-2021-conference/): The opening worship service of the 2021 Theology Matters conference. Richard Gibbons preaches the welcome sermon, setting the theological frame for the gathering and inviting attendees into the conversation that follows.
- [The Significance of Ernst Lohmeyer for Christian Witness](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-significance-of-ernst-lohmeyer-for-christian-witness/): Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.
- [The Juvenilization of American Christianity](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-juvenilization-of-american-christianity/): Presbyterians prize mature leadership, but American Christianity has spent seven decades absorbing the values of adolescence. Bergler summarizes his award-winning book on how youth ministry shaped the wider church and what we lost by treating perpetual youthfulness as a virtue.
- [Ministry During a Time of Great Change](https://theologymatters.com/articles/ministry-during-a-time-of-great-change/): COVID-era ministry left pastors asking questions they'd never had to ask before. Brown sets the pandemic alongside cultural upheavals over identity, race, and politics, and offers practical reminders for ministry that hold up no matter which kind of change is washing over the room.
- [The Holy Spirit and Presbyterians](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-holy-spirit-and-presbyterians/): B. B. Warfield called Calvin pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit. Burnett walks through what Calvin actually taught, why Presbyterians have argued about pneumatology ever since, and where the tradition's habits of thought still serve and where they leave gaps.
- [Theological Mystery of Words](https://theologymatters.com/articles/theological-mystery-of-words/): Ray opens with himself as a fifteen-year-old on a weather-beaten ship bound for Austria, the journey on which he first noticed how much words could carry. The piece works toward a theology of language: words as one of the gifts that lets us think God's thoughts after him.
- [What Have We Learned During the COVID Crisis?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-have-we-learned-during-the-covid-crisis/): A year into the pandemic, Burnett surveys what Western churches have learned about themselves: the limits of technology, the costs of physical absence, and the question every pastor is now sitting with: will the people actually come back?
- [Two Views of Mortality](https://theologymatters.com/articles/two-views-of-mortality/): Billings is dying of cancer, and the bones inside him are described by a doctor as 'like Swiss cheese.' He writes about how Christians and the wider culture talk about death, and why those two ways of talking diverge so sharply at the end.
- [Is Authentic Christian Community Even Possible?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/is-authentic-christian-community-even-possible/): The secular world has 'come of age' and finds the church unnecessary. Johnson argues that authentic Christian community begins not with our programs but with Christ himself, and walks Bonhoeffer's insight from Nazi-era Germany into the present-day American congregation.
- [The Feast of Many Memories](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-feast-of-many-memories/): Church-leadership conferences offer endless cures for stagnant congregations: webinars, restructuring, mergers, branding consultants. Ray draws on John Leith and a long memory to question whether any of these have actually produced what they promise, and to point toward what historically has.
- [Calvin Meets Voltaire – An Interview with Jennifer Powell McNutt](https://theologymatters.com/articles/calvin-meets-voltaire-an-interview-with-jennifer-powell-mcnutt/): Working interviews Jennifer McNutt about her book Calvin Meets Voltaire, which traces the Geneva clergy who held the Reformed line through the Enlightenment. The Geneva pastors offer a longer view for any congregational leader feeling outnumbered by the cultural moment.
- [A Theology of the Ordinary](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-theology-of-the-ordinary/): Canlis returned to America after seventeen years abroad and was struck by how aggressively the culture sells 'best,' 'biggest,' 'greatest.' Reading Paul through Eugene Peterson, she argues for a theology of the ordinary that finds the work of God in walking-around life.
- [Is Theology Practical?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/is-theology-practical/): Three months into pastoral ministry, Nixon noticed that her seminary theology courses turned out to be more practical than the courses labeled 'practical theology.' This conference address asks why, and what congregations lose when academic theology gets quietly dismissed as impractical.
- [On Reconciliation – Honoring the Work of Jesus Christ](https://theologymatters.com/articles/on-reconciliation-honoring-the-work-of-jesus-christ/): 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.
- [A Provocative Confession: Jesus as the Truth](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-provocative-confession-jesus-as-the-truth/): Wisdom summarizes Burnett's keynote at the 2020 TM conference: confessing Jesus as the truth has always been provocative, always contested, and never confessed for long without a cost. Burnett works the claim through Barmen and into our own moment.
- [Clothes Make the Man (or the Woman)?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/clothes-make-the-man-or-the-woman/): What clergy wear in worship has changed in his lifetime, and Taylor isn't quite sure all the changes are improvements. Working from Lorimer's nineteenth-century painting of a Scottish Kirk ordination, he reflects on the theology of vestments and what gets lost when the gown disappears.
- [Can the Lord’s Supper Be “Online”?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/can-the-lords-supper-be-online/): Online communion split Presbyterians worldwide during COVID. Taylor lays out why his own congregation declined the option even when their denomination permitted it, taking Paul's warning about the body of the Lord seriously enough to insist the body matters.
- [Jesus Christ is the Life – Part 2](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-life-part-2/): Part two of Burgess's keynote on John 14:6 picks up the human longing for life that is more than survival. He locates the answer not in the desperate self-renewal our culture sells, but in the gift of life that comes to us from outside ourselves through Christ.
- [Jesus Christ is the Truth – Part 2](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-truth-part-2/): Part two of Burnett's keynote on Barmen Article 1: Jesus Christ as the one Word of God we have to hear. The talk takes seriously the 'events and powers, figures and truths' that compete for that role in our own time, and how the church learns to refuse them.
- [Jesus Christ is the Way – Part 2](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-way-part-2/): Edwards continues his treatment of John 14:6 by looking at Jesus' own preferred self-designation: Son of Man. Why this odd title from Daniel 7, and what does it tell us about the way Jesus understood himself as 'the way' the Father had given his people?
- [My Body, Broken for Zoom?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/my-body-broken-for-zoom/): Nixon learned the limits of video calling during a long-distance courtship: the format is a poor substitute for actually being together. She brings that lesson to bear on the COVID-era church, where Zoom worship and live-streamed sacraments couldn't fill the space the gathered body of Christ left behind.
- [Jesus Christ is the Life – Part 1](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-life/): Burgess opens with a memory of his grandfather, a lifelong Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala, scooping him up off a Denver bus when he was four. The keynote builds from that scene toward the question every Christian eventually meets: where is real life actually found?
- [Jesus Christ is the Truth – Part 1](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-truth/): The 2020 TM conference set itself the task of confessing Jesus as the way, truth, and life in a pluralistic culture. Burnett's opening keynote asks what makes that confession provocative now, and what we still need to learn about saying it well.
- [Jesus Christ is the Way – Part 1](https://theologymatters.com/articles/jesus-christ-is-the-way/): John 14:6 is the most famous line in the Fourth Gospel and the only place there Jesus calls himself 'the way.' Edwards argues that 'way, truth, and life' aren't three separate virtues but characteristics of a single person, and that John 14 isn't about future glory but present access.
- [“All The Ministers Shall Meet Together”](https://theologymatters.com/articles/all-the-ministers-shall-meet-together/): When Luther posted his theses, Calvin was eight. Small traces the road from a French schoolboy's eventual 'sudden conversion' through Geneva's vote to live by gospel and Word, to the day Calvin meant to spend one night in town and ended up shaping a movement instead.
- [A Pastoral Rule For Today](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-pastoral-rule-for-today/): Pastors are asked to be administrators, therapists, CEOs, organizers, and visionaries, and many are exhausted. Burnett interviews Burgess, Andrews, and Small about their book recovering the ancient practice of a pastoral rule, examining lives from Augustine to Bonhoeffer for what shaped fruitful ministry.
- [Preaching according to the Lectio Continua: Practical Questions & Considerations](https://theologymatters.com/articles/preaching-according-to-the-lectio-continua-practical-questions-considerations/): Lectionary preaching protects congregations from their preacher's pet agendas. Lectio continua, preaching consecutively through books of the Bible, was the Reformed alternative recovered from the Fathers. Old answers the practical questions raised by anyone trying to do it now: where to start, how long to spend, what to do with hard texts.
- [Earl Palmer on Expository Preaching](https://theologymatters.com/articles/earl-palmer-on-expository-preaching/): Earl Palmer has been called the best expository preacher in America of his generation. Burnett interviews him at age eighty-five about how he came to faith at Cal Berkeley, what shaped his approach to the text, and what he wants the next generation of preachers to keep alive.
- [John Calvin on Theatrical Trifles in Worship](https://theologymatters.com/articles/john-calvin-on-theatrical-trifles-in-worship/): Late medieval worship was overrun with what Calvin called theatrical trifles. Ray follows Calvin's polemic into its sources and stakes, and asks what 'theatrical' looks like in modern Reformed worship that has long since stopped policing itself by the standard Calvin set.
- [Calvin’s Theology of Pastoral Care](https://theologymatters.com/articles/calvins-theology-of-pastoral-care/): How did Calvin actually understand pastoral care? Willis works from Calvin's commentary on John 10, where Christ alone is the shepherd and human pastors serve only in a derivative sense, and shows what that subordination meant for the daily work of caring for souls.
- [Holy Saturday & the Hell of Coming Home: Caring for War Wounded Souls](https://theologymatters.com/articles/holy-saturday-the-hell-of-coming-home-caring-for-war-wounded-souls/): 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.
- [The Care of Souls Through the Centuries](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-care-of-souls-through-the-centuries/): Irenaeus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, Calvin: a remarkable continuity runs through the church's understanding of what pastors are for. Burnett gathers their voices into a single conversation about the care of souls and asks what's been quietly dropped from the trade in our time.
- [Invitation to a Pillar Fight](https://theologymatters.com/articles/invitation-to-a-pillar-fight/): 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.
- [The Call to Love the Small](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-call-to-love-the-small/): The Christmas story turns on small things: an old couple visited by an angel, a young woman of little standing, a manger. Gatewood follows that pattern as a calling for the church: to love the small, since this is precisely how the Mighty One came to be among us.
- [Recovering the Office of Elder – The Shepherd Model, Part III](https://theologymatters.com/articles/recovering-the-office-of-elder-the-shepherd-model-part-iii/): The third and final part of Laverentz's series on the elder as shepherd. Drawing on the original 1788 PCUSA Constitution, he sketches what eldering as soul-care could look like in a twenty-first-century congregation, and what's at stake when the office shrinks to corporate-board duties.
- [Returning to the Basics](https://theologymatters.com/articles/returning-to-the-basics/): Peterson watches rock climbers on a vertical 2,000-foot face and notices what looks reckless is actually patient: every move tested, ropes secure, basics never forgotten. He turns the image into a question for the Christian life: how often do we mistake competent ascent for spectacle?
- [Rediscovering the Office of Elder. The Shepherd Model, Part II](https://theologymatters.com/articles/rediscovering-the-office-of-elder-the-shepherd-model-part-ii/): Part two of the elder series opens with an 1898 Kansas City session quietly addressing one of their elders' moral failure with the kind of pastoral seriousness modern church courts have largely abandoned. Laverentz reads the case as a lost grammar of shepherding.
- [Preparing for Baptisms And Supporting the Baptized](https://theologymatters.com/articles/preparing-for-baptisms-and-supporting-the-baptized/): Burgess works through baptism in the form of a parish dialogue: Martha worries the congregation doesn't follow up, Jerry's too busy, Lisa's not sure baptism matters, Max thinks it's mostly welcome. The conversation works toward a shared theology of what the church is doing when it pours water.
- [Are You Ready For a Real Theologian?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/are-you-ready-for-a-real-theologian/): Burnett uses Eugene Peterson's lesser-known The Wisdom of Each Other to think about the church as a supernatural community. Peterson's old friend Gunnar shows up after forty years of silence, ready to quit competing with God and join him, and the letters that follow are a quiet education in faith.
- [Luther, Calvin, and the Recovery of Congregational Singing. Is the Reformers’ Legacy at Risk?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/luther-calvin-and-the-recovery-of-congregational-singing-is-the-reformers-legacy-at-risk/): Before the Reformation, Catholic worship had no congregational singing and no music in the language people actually spoke. Mills traces how Luther and Calvin recovered the song of the gathered people, and asks whether contemporary churches are quietly drifting back toward the silence the Reformers fought.
- [Rediscovering the Office of Elder-The Shepherd Model, Part I](https://theologymatters.com/articles/rediscovering-the-office-of-elder-the-shepherd-model-part-i/): What does it mean to be an elder? Laverentz argues that for most of Presbyterian history, an elder was a shepherd of souls, deeply enmeshed in people's lives. Part one of his series looks at how that understanding has nearly disappeared in a single generation.
- [Finding Joy on the Journey of Grief](https://theologymatters.com/articles/finding-joy-on-the-journey-of-grief/): Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after losing Joy Davidman to cancer in 1960. Barnes reads Lewis through his own grief after his wife Lorie's death in 2016, and finds something neither sentimental nor stoic: an honest path through the territory grief actually traverses.
- [The Reformed Pastor Confronts the “Last Enemy”](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-reformed-pastor-confronts-the-last-enemy/): Death blows the empty clichés out of pastoral ministry like an umbrella in a hurricane. McSween focuses on the funeral service and sermon as the place where a Reformed pastor has a unique Word to proclaim, and where the gospel is most acutely needed and most easily mishandled.
- [John Calvin on Death and Grief](https://theologymatters.com/articles/john-calvin-on-death-and-grief/): It's hard to picture John Calvin grieving, or writing tender letters to bereaved friends. Nixon shows that we should picture exactly that. The Reformed tradition's reputation for being rigorous-but-cold is a caricature, and Calvin himself is the first witness against it.
- [Calvin and Barth on the Unity of the Church](https://theologymatters.com/articles/calvin-and-barth-on-the-unity-of-the-church/): Calvin once wrote that he would gladly cross ten seas if it would help mend the church's torn body. Burnett puts that ferocity in conversation with Karl Barth, and asks what the two together have to say to a denomination tempted to treat division as routine.
- [A House Divided](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-house-divided/): PCUSA, EPC, ECO, PCA, OPC: the Presbyterian family in America has become a set of clans that mistrust each other's seminaries, agencies, and theology. Stith calls the hardening 'ecclesial sclerosis' and asks whether anything like a shared Reformed identity survives the fragmentation.
- [Martin Luther: A Moment to Remember](https://theologymatters.com/articles/martin-luther-a-moment-to-remember/): Gibbons grew up Catholic in Scotland, considered the priesthood as a teenager, and never imagined he would one day preach at the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt where Luther had taken his vows. The piece is a personal Reformation memoir written from inside the surprise.
- [Orthodoxy at Stake](https://theologymatters.com/articles/orthodoxy-at-stake/): The PCUSA's Book of Order has long carried six 'Great Ends of the Church' that mark out what every Presbyterian congregation is for. Small reads them slowly, asks whether contemporary church life still recognizes itself in them, and offers a defense of orthodoxy that is anything but defensive.
- [When Theology Burns](https://theologymatters.com/articles/when-theology-burns/): Ray picks up Julian of Norwich's Showings, reads it again, and finds soteriology buried in the oddities of her sentences. The piece is about what happens when a theological text actually does its work: the reader walks under an electric arch into a different world.
- [Three Pastoral Insights From Martin Luther](https://theologymatters.com/articles/three-pastoral-insights-from-martin-luther/): Hylton encouraged his congregation to mark the Reformation's 500th anniversary, then noticed that the popular media coverage focused mostly on Luther's failings. He pulls three pastoral insights from Luther's example, the kind that hold up regardless of what we think of his weaker moments.
- [Does the Reformation Still Matter?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/does-the-reformation-still-matter/): 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.
- [Worship Matters](https://theologymatters.com/articles/worship-matters/): Luther asked how a sinner is made right with God. Calvin asked an even prior question: how is God rightly worshiped? Taylor argues that the Reformation's deepest legacy is the Reformed insistence that justification exists for the sake of worship, and worship is the goal toward which salvation tends.
- [Doing Life Together: A Priesthood of All Believers](https://theologymatters.com/articles/doing-life-together-a-priesthood-of-all-believers-2/): Fifty million American adults attend small groups, a practice that would have been heresy in the Middle Ages. Duff traces the line from the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers through Hebrews 7 and 1 Peter 2 to the Bible study meeting in someone's living room tonight.
- [The Bible’s Church](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-bibles-church/): Does the Bible belong to the church or the church to the Bible? McConnell traces the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura from a time when most believers had no copy of the text to one in which everyone has free access and somehow no longer has time to read it.
- [No Substitute for the Word](https://theologymatters.com/articles/no-substitute-for-the-word/): 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.
- [The Source of Revolution](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-source-of-revolution/): October 31, 1517: Luther nails ninety-five theological challenges to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world soon catches fire. Dawson tells the story of the question that haunted Luther for years before that morning, and the answer that, once found, set everything in motion.
- [The Call to Reformation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-call-to-reformation/): Luther was supposed to become a lawyer; his ambitious father had a plan. A thunderstorm changed the plan. Barnes follows the personal story of how an unlikely candidate became the central figure of European Christianity in the 1500s, and what we still learn from his unexpected calling.
- [How the Reformation Shapes our Life Together](https://theologymatters.com/articles/how-the-reformation-shapes-our-life-together/): A tomato plant's tag promised that 'deep roots produce abundant fruits,' which Hurley took as a parable of Reformation heritage. The piece is a pastor's reflection on how five-century-old roots actually feed the present, and what fruits a Reformed congregation might still expect to see.
- [Calvin’s Way of Preaching in a Digital Age](https://theologymatters.com/articles/calvins-way-of-preaching-in-a-digital-age/): Does the preaching model of Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bullinger, and Calvin still speak to a generation shaped by smart phones, Hulu, and Instagram? Gibbons argues that the Reformers' way of preaching is not a museum piece but a working practice, and shows how it travels into the digital age.
- [Commemorating the Reformation in “Post-Christian” Europe?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/commemorating-the-reformation-in-post-christian-europe/): Selderhuis traces Reformation commemorations all the way back to 1617, when Friedrich V of the Palatinate first proposed a centennial celebration. What the jubilees have meant has shifted with each generation; this one looks back from the vantage of a Europe that no longer assumes Christian assumptions.
- [Seeking A Correctible Conscience](https://theologymatters.com/articles/seeking-a-correctible-conscience/): 'Here I stand, I can do no other' is one of the most famous lines in Christian history, and Luther probably never said it. Thompson untangles three things popular memory has gotten wrong about the Diet of Worms, and recovers what Luther actually meant by Christian conscience.
- [Luther’s Mistress and Knowledge of Ourselves](https://theologymatters.com/articles/luthers-mistress-and-knowledge-of-ourselves/): Luther had a mistress, or thought he did, and he sometimes called her Reason. Burnett uses Luther's polemic to recover something the Reformers actually believed about reason: a gift of God to be cherished and exercised, but never the master of revelation.
- [A Reforming Recommendation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-reforming-recommendation/): Pelikan called the Reformation a tragic necessity, and Gatewood holds the two halves of that phrase together. The piece reads as both celebration of the Word's work in the Reformers' generation and lament over the divisions their work left for us to inherit.
- [Who Needs Confessions of Faith?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/who-needs-confessions-of-faith/): Why do Protestants have confessions of faith? Burnett's answer is short: not because we want to say more than the Bible says, but because we don't want to say less. He walks through the docetist controversy as the kind of crisis that makes confession unavoidable.
- [Exile and New Life](https://theologymatters.com/articles/exile-and-new-life/): Dearman reads the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles as the Old Testament's primary picture of corporate failure, and as the matrix N.T. Wright says shaped Jesus' announcement of the kingdom. The PCUSA's own systemic failures put us in conversation with that text from the inside.
- [Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Protestant Reformation](https://theologymatters.com/articles/looking-back-looking-forward-the-protestant-reformation/): October 31, 1517 was meant to be a scholarly debate among theologians at the University of Wittenberg. McGlasson works back into the local controversy over indulgences, finds an early version of the modern prosperity gospel, and argues the first thesis still says the load-bearing thing.
- [If I were a Church School Teacher Again](https://theologymatters.com/articles/if-i-were-a-church-school-teacher-again/): Bruce Metzger spent his career as one of America's foremost biblical scholars but began as a Sunday School superintendent. These late-career reflections on what he would do if he had a classroom again are practical, simple, and clear-eyed about what religious instruction is actually for.
- [The Catechized Prodigal: When Covenant Children Lose Their Way](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-catechized-prodigal-when-covenant-children-lose-their-way/): Proverbs uses contrast to teach: life or death, wisdom or folly, no comfortable middle. Hering brings the Proverbs' grammar of formation to bear on the painful experience of catechized children who walk away anyway, and finds the tradition has more to say than parents often imagine.
- [Surveying Presbyterian Beliefs](https://theologymatters.com/articles/surveying-presbyterian-beliefs/): The PCUSA's own panel survey on theological reflection turns up some good news and considerable confusion. Bush walks through the data carefully, including how the survey's own categories made a coherent answer harder than it had to be, and what the responses tell us about where Presbyterians actually stand.
- [Learning to Speak Thoughtfully of Jesus: Calvin’s Way With Heretics](https://theologymatters.com/articles/learning-to-speak-thoughtfully-of-jesus-calvins-way-with-heretics/): Sixteenth-century Reformers worked in a vacuum where ancient heresies clamored for reconsideration. Finch shows how Calvin held to Nicene and Chalcedonian Christology even while insisting on sola scriptura, and what his way of speaking carefully about Jesus has to teach a church facing similar pressures today.
- [A Reformation Day Sermon](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-reformation-day-sermon/): A Reformation Day sermon on Ephesians 2:8-9 that opens with the surprisingly theological politics of tipping. McKechnie uses the everyday transaction to set up the very different logic of grace, and Luther's recovery of it after centuries of religious tipping had buried the gospel.
- [The Vertical: “Be Reconciled to God” A Sermon to the 222nd General Assembly](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-vertical-be-reconciled-to-god-a-sermon-to-the-222nd-general-assembly/): 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.
- [Why Church Leaders Should Study Theology](https://theologymatters.com/articles/why-church-leaders-should-study-theology/): Any organization needs leaders who know what it exists to do and how well it's doing it. Patterson argues that theology is exactly that knowledge for the church, and that pastors and elders who treat it as optional are quietly steering their congregations toward irrelevance.
- [Worship Reformed According to Scripture](https://theologymatters.com/articles/worship-reformed-according-to-scripture/): 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.
- [Does Theology Still Matter?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/does-theology-still-matter/): After two decades of asserting that theology matters, Burnett asks the harder question: has it actually mattered? He surveys the major debates in the PCUSA over sexuality, the sanctity of life, and Book of Order revisions, and asks how often theology has actually shaped the outcomes.
- [Is the Reformation Ever Finished?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/is-the-reformation-ever-finished/): 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.
- [John Calvin on the Unity and Truthfulness of the Church](https://theologymatters.com/articles/john-calvin-on-the-unity-and-truthfulness-of-the-church/): Karl Barth once described Calvin as 'a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power.' Goodloe doesn't disagree but finds, like Barth, that one could profitably spend a lifetime there. The piece reads Calvin on church unity for what he still has to teach a fragmenting PCUSA.
- [Reclaiming Theological Education](https://theologymatters.com/articles/reclaiming-theological-education/): In 1943 Princeton Theological Seminary required apologetics. The next year, it dropped from the curriculum entirely. Dembski traces how rational defense of the Christian faith, once taken for granted as a Christian duty, became theologically suspect, and what the seminary's loss has cost the church.
- [Is God Irrelevant?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/is-god-irrelevant/): 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.
- [The Canon of the New Testament](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-canon-of-the-new-testament/): How did the New Testament come to be a single collection of twenty-seven books, distinct from everything else early Christians read? F. F. Bruce examines what historical research can show about the canon's emergence, alongside the historic Christian belief that the Spirit who inspired the books also gathered them.
- [The Formation of the New Testament Canon](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-formation-of-the-new-testament-canon/): Metzger walks through the influences that quietly shaped the New Testament canon: which books circulated, which got read aloud in worship, which got cited as Scripture by the Fathers. The story is one of the most important developments in early Christian thought, and history is largely silent about it.
- [Canon: A Moving Target?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/canon-a-moving-target/): Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown have made the New Testament canon a contested question again, presenting it as a top-down decree imposed on the early church. Hobson goes back to the actual history and shows that councils didn't decide the canon; they recognized what had already become Scripture by use.
- [What, Who, Where, How: Reformed Perspectives on Baptism](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-who-where-how-reformed-perspectives-on-baptism/): 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.
- [Abortion and the Sacraments](https://theologymatters.com/articles/abortion-and-the-sacraments/): Christians are made to be different. Achtemeier follows that New Testament refrain into the abortion debate, arguing that the church's witness on the unborn is finally a sacramental one: people who live by the powers of the triune Lord cannot value human life on the world's terms.
- [A Framework, Not a Roadmap: Christians Can Foster Peace, Justice, and Freedom in the Middle East](https://theologymatters.com/articles/a-framework-not-a-roadmap-christians-can-foster-peace-justice-and-freedom-in-the-middle-east/): The Bible doesn't supply a roadmap for Mideast policy, but it does offer a framework. Wisdom draws principles from the biblical story: God owns the land, the powerful tend to dominate the powerless, the people of God must act justly toward outsiders, and no political order can be trusted absolutely.
- [The Political Dilemmas of Arab Christianity](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-political-dilemmas-of-arab-christianity/): Middle Eastern Christian minorities have a painful political history, and they've sometimes made the mess worse. Wisdom traces how Arab Christians moved between democratic statesmen like Charles Malik and the nationalist movements that ultimately failed to protect them, and what the record teaches about Christian political alliances.
- [Arguing From Evidence: Why Support Israel?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/arguing-from-evidence-why-support-israel/): Evangelical support for Israel is often dismissed as purely theological, a matter of obscure end-times prophecies. Wisdom argues there's plenty of evidence that doesn't require special revelation: a small minority people surviving repeated attempts at extermination is unique enough to read on the surface.
- [Stretching Scripture Too Far: Apocalyptic Prophecy as Mideast Policy Guide](https://theologymatters.com/articles/stretching-scripture-too-far-apocalyptic-prophecy-as-mideast-policy-guide/): Christians who hold a high view of biblical inspiration are sometimes most tempted to wring policy prescriptions out of texts that weren't written for that purpose. Wisdom warns against the apocalyptic-prophecy approach to Mideast policy, and recovers a more sober use of Scripture for political discernment.
- [Lands of Promise and Conflict: The Middle East in Biblical Understanding](https://theologymatters.com/articles/lands-of-promise-and-conflict-the-middle-east-in-biblical-understanding/): Anyone trying to understand the Middle East has to reckon with the fact that the events of the Bible took place there. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim spiritual descent from the same patch of ground. Wisdom unfolds what that overlapping inheritance has produced, and how Christians might think about it.
- [Falling Short of the Solas](https://theologymatters.com/articles/falling-short-of-the-solas/): Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Soli Deo Gloria: the five Solas were the Reformers' refusal to compromise. Poteet examines what's been lost when contemporary liberalism quietly trims them, and how the church might restore the lines the Reformers thought load-bearing.
- [Centers and Boundaries](https://theologymatters.com/articles/centers-and-boundaries/): Centrifugal force in physics pushes a body away from the center. Mills uses Buechner's lexicon entry on sin (also centrifugal) to argue that theological boundaries do for the church what asphalt does for a car: not constrict, but keep us from flying off the road into wreckage.
- [Identifying Boundaries](https://theologymatters.com/articles/identifying-boundaries/): 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.
- [The Women Prophets of Corinth: A Study of Aspects of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16](https://theologymatters.com/articles/the-women-prophets-of-corinth-a-study-of-aspects-of-1-corinthians-112-16/): 1 Corinthians 11 has supplied 'regimental colors' for centuries of arguments about women in worship. Bailey reads the passage in its larger literary context (1 Cor 11-14 as a single essay) and offers a careful answer to what Paul actually meant when he addressed women's prayer and prophecy.
- [Paul’s Theology of Sexual Practice: A Study of 1 Corinthians 6:9-20](https://theologymatters.com/articles/pauls-theology-of-sexual-practice-a-study-of-1-corinthians-69-20/): Bailey brings thirty-five years of work on 1 Corinthians to bear on chapter 6's strenuous teaching about sexual practice. Paul wrote the letter for the Corinthians and for everyone everywhere on whom Christ's name is called, and the early church through Calvin agreed: he meant exactly what he said.
- [What is Marriage?](https://theologymatters.com/articles/what-is-marriage/): Two competing answers to what marriage is: a conjugal union ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children, or a romantic partnership defined by emotional commitment. George argues that the disagreement isn't really about same-sex marriage at all but about whether marriage has any inherent structure to defend.
- [Two Views of Marriage](https://theologymatters.com/articles/two-views-of-marriage/): The 220th General Assembly's overtures to redefine marriage are the next logical step after 2011's repeal of fidelity-and-chastity ordination standards. Wisdom walks through the proposed changes, the constitutional process they would require, and what the church teaches that all of them quietly assume isn't binding.
- [Marriage on Trial](https://theologymatters.com/articles/marriage-on-trial/): A Q&A summary from Stanton and Maier's book Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting. The piece walks through why no society has allowed a 'suit yourself' approach to family, and what natural marriage between a man and woman accomplishes that nothing else does.
- [Preaching The Gospel With The Great Preacher: Ten Convictions After 40 Years Of Trying To Do It Well](https://theologymatters.com/articles/preaching-the-gospel-with-the-great-preacher-ten-convictions-after-40-years-of-trying-to-do-it-well/): Forty years into preaching, Johnson offers ten convictions about what it actually takes to do the work well. Romans 10 frames the piece: how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard?
- [Suffering Redeemed: A Reformed Argument Against Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia](https://theologymatters.com/articles/suffering-redeemed/): Aguzzi defines the terms of the euthanasia debate carefully, distinguishes the various forms it takes, and offers a Reformed argument that suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to a person and that physician-assisted death cannot be reconciled with what the Christian tradition teaches about life and death.

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## About Theology Matters

Theology Matters is a Reformed publication. We publish a free quarterly print journal mailed to anyone who requests it, run an annual conference, and operate the Institute for Theological Education. Our writers are Reformed pastors, seminary professors, and theologians engaged with contemporary church debates from a confessional Presbyterian standpoint.

Our audience: ordained ministers, seminary faculty and students, denominational leaders, and theologically literate lay readers. Citations of Scripture, the Reformed confessions (especially Westminster), Calvin, Barth, and the patristic tradition are typical of our work.

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## Citation Guidance

When citing Theology Matters articles, please attribute the author and link to the source URL. Articles are published under the editorial direction of the Theology Matters board; the journal is a distinct ministry from the Foundation for Reformed Theology, with which it shares some leadership.