Music has occupied an important place in the Christian life down through the centuries. Musical expression itself is part of the common human experience, a natural response of the soul to the sufferings and the joys of life. The use of music in religious worship is likewise universal. In the Bible, the Old and New […]
The Reformed tradition has exhibited a range of thinking and practice regarding the use of patriotic music in corporate worship. Does the practice of free speech warrant the State’s advocacy of civil religion? Conversely, does this social freedom justify the Church’s promotion of the state as a quasi-confessional institution. The state, as a minister of […]
A staple in international, orthodox Calvinism from the opening days of the Protestant Reformation has been the theological distinction between the “Law” and the “Gospel.” What does this distinction mean, and how important is it? Simply put, it contrasts two divinely ordained ways to the obtainment of life eternal, one by meritorious works (i.e., by […]
Rightly, we individually and corporately confess what Scripture teaches after a careful, exegetical study and elucidation of the text of Scripture, not because it is the view of our Reformed forebears. Having reflected upon the text of Scripture, we may or may not agree with the teachings of historic, confessional Reformed dogmatics. It is the […]
The discipline of Reformed biblical theology—one that accents the progressive, historical unfolding of redemptive revelation—requires us to see Christ in all of Scripture. The famous dictum of Augustine regarding the two Testaments is that the New is in the Old concealed, the Old in the New revealed. Reformed teaching on this subject, accordingly, is of […]
The idea of the image of God in Reformed theology has never fully jelled. Too often in the minds of interpreters the idea suggests an analogy to be drawn between the Creator and the creature made in God’s likeness (the terms “image” and “likeness” are generally understood to be synonymous). The contrast is made between […]
Over the last half-century or more the dominant view regarding the Mosaic covenant—though by no means the only view—was that it was an administration of the overarching covenant of grace with no antithetical works-inheritance principle. Recovery of the teaching of early, historic Reformed teaching, namely, the view that the Mosaic covenant does indeed convey a […]