My family and I have been reading through Jeremiah lately in our family worship. The morning I began writing this article, we read Jeremiah 22, which begins with God's telling Zedekiah, king of Judah, that if he would do justice and righteousness in obedience to his Word, "then there [would] enter the gates of [that] […]
It is impossible to read Jonathan Edwards's long 1734/1738 treatise on justification by faith alone without realizing that one is in the presence of a very great mind. The treatise is as rigorous in argument and subtle in its distinctions as any of his other writings. At the same time, however, it seems fair to […]
Since the various versions of the New Perspective on Paul, as well as the "Federal Vision" perspective in our own circles, have been so helpfully defined, I will simply lay out the following argument: Despite significant variations, there does seem to be what E. P. Sanders would call a "pattern of religion" that pretty fairly […]
With all the controversy that has raged about justification in the past generation, it is surprising that for some time the question of what faith is has remained more marginal. However, this issue has recently come into the foreground of both the church's and the academy's attention. The present essay aims to do justice both […]
I am frequently amazed when I walk into unattended, understaffed, and poorly run businesses. In such cases I wonder how they stay in business. Often they do not. In today's global capitalism, other things being equal, there is a correlation between performance and prosperity. Employers demand performance from their employees and clients demand performance from […]
Anthony J. Carter is a personal friend of mine, and the thesis of this book has been a major part of our discussion over the years. I therefore review this book as one familiar not only with its contents, but also with the thought from which it has evolved. Chapter one raises a question that […]
In a 1970 article, historian George M. Marsden provocatively argued that twentieth-century American Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism owed as much to the previous century's New School Presbyterianism as to the Old School stream represented by Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. With their activist brand of piety and evangelistic-oriented vision of ministry, many New […]
"Trickle-down economics" is the idea that tax cuts benefit all parties by increasing the size of the whole economic pie, thereby increasing the size of each of the slices; that is, "A rising tide lifts all boats." In a day when serious theological reflection is no longer la mode-found more often by the crumb than […]
