Baptism
Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. […]
Spanish and Portuguese are close siblings. Both descended from Latin and developed alongside one another on the Iberian Peninsula in relative isolation from their closest European neighbors. Spanish and Portuguese thus have what linguists call a “high degree of mutual intelligibility.” […]
God’s sheep are safest when living in clearly fenced enclosures. There, they learn where food is given to them and where their shepherd enters and exits. […]
Abraham Rothe (1666–1730) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor from Żary in what is now western Poland. He defended his Dissertatio theologica de efficacia baptismi (1692), from which this excerpt is translated […]
The English Puritan search for the New Testament’s pattern or blueprint of how to “do church” formed the matrix of Baptist origins in the first half of the seventeenth century. Of the two Baptist communities that emerged in this era—the General Baptists, who were Arminian, and the Particular Baptists, who were Calvinistic—the latter were far […]
As part of his daily prayers, a typical first-century Jewish man began by thanking God for not making him a Gentile, a slave—and finally—for not making him a woman. In a fallen world, we are socially conditioned by messages about who’s important and who’s not, who’s precious and who’s expend-able, who should be in and […]
In his commentary on 1 Corin-thians 10:4, John Calvin makes an interesting comment worth briefly exploring on the sacraments, the ascension of Jesus, and the work of the Holy Spirit. Apparently, many in Corinth were hiding behind the efficacy of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as a sort of prophylactic against judgment, […]
Has God ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth? The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents. In the past, confessional Protestants, such as Presbyterians and Lutherans, planted new churches in a remarkably calm way. Several families would move away from a community […]
One of the more common questions I have heard over the years from my Baptist friends is, "How can an infant benefit from baptism?" The common assumption is that an infant has no capacity for faith, and therefore the child has no concept of what is occurring in his or her baptism; hence, baptism cannot […]
