Essays

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Ancient Christian confessions like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed define the boundaries and content of the Christian faith in accordance with Scripture. But they also function as essential identity formation. These creeds are much more than checklists of personal beliefs [...]

Joshua Pauling
Thursday, November 30th 2023

From the smallest insect to the greatest monster of the deep, from the weakest child to the mightiest of men, no creature can exist without God’s word, and without God’s word there is no life and salvation. God’s word does what it says [...]

Todd R. Hains
Wednesday, November 1st 2023

Our world today is marked by something so obvious we miss just how peculiar it is: the existence of another world that is both “in and not of” our physical world. Not because the other world is purely spiritual; I’m speaking about the existence of the digital realm. [...]

Jared L. Jones
Wednesday, November 1st 2023

In the late 1590s, before he became chaplain to King James, a translator of the Authorized Version, a British delegate to the Synod of Dordt, or Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Samuel Ward was a twenty-something student at Christ College [...]

Zachary Purvis
Wednesday, November 1st 2023

I recently spoke with a younger friend who is battling cancer, which has included a great deal of pain. We had not spoken for a while, and I was struck by the change in his voice when he answered the phone [...]

J. D. Dusenbury
Friday, September 1st 2023

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed [...]

Jonathan King
Friday, September 1st 2023

As we look around at the general troubles of the world and at the specific trials we face in our own contexts—ravaging wars, ethnic strife, poverty, pandemic, and persecution—we may wonder if God is really reigning [...]

Aruthuckal Varughese John
Friday, September 1st 2023

Part question, part protest, the plaintive cry “Are we there yet?” punctuates any family vacation worth talking about. Clearly, we’re not where we were, but we also haven’t arrived [...]

Michael S. Horton
Friday, September 1st 2023

The feel of dirt mattered to Wolfgang Musculus. Common dust and clay and grass accompanied many of his formative experiences like sod stuck to a child’s knee. [...]

Zachary Purvis
Friday, September 1st 2023

The last few years have seen a global pandemic, civil unrest, and increased political division. These miasmas of polarization, alienation, and apathy have been accompanied by stranger trends […]

Caleb Wait
Saturday, July 1st 2023

When I was growing up, my father had a rather extensive collection of 78 RPM records, the ones made of shellac in the first half of the twentieth century before vinyl took over. […]

William Edgar
Saturday, July 1st 2023

Online worship. Zoom church. Streaming services on Facebook Live (if you can get it to actually work). We’re all used to this strange new world by now. But it can get stranger […]

Joshua Pauling
Saturday, July 1st 2023

A crushed spirit dries up the bones. (Prov. 17:22) He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. (1 Pet. 2:24) Technology’s triumph over space, its power to entertain and distract, its promise of enabling us to construct not only our own virtual identities but our own realities […]

J. D. Dusenbury
Saturday, July 1st 2023

If there were a silver lining to the dark cloud of the recent COVID-19 restrictions, it would be that we were compelled to think about our bodies: what to put on them, what to put in them, how proximate to other bodies to place them. […]

T. David Gordon
Saturday, July 1st 2023

Outside the Catholic vicar-general’s house in Geneva, a large mob of priests congealed in the thin sunlight one autumn morning in 1532. Inside, Guillaume Farel, the French Protestant missionary who had stopped in Geneva, was summoned to answer the accusations of ten canons of the cathedral chapter. […]

Zachary Purvis
Saturday, July 1st 2023
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“Modern Reformation has championed confessional Reformation theology in an anti-confessional and anti-theological age.”

J. Ligon Duncan, IIISenior Minister, First Presbyterian Church