Theology

Several years ago I worked for a funeral director. On one occasion I travelled with him to another city in order to recover a body. The person, a younger person, had traveled and died while out of town. On the way to the city morgue my boss and I talked together. I found out later that he was...

I have often noted in conversation that “scholasticism” is a bad word with bad connotations for many people. However, it has also become a strange word that does strange things to people. In some cases, it may even produce strange people or make the strange ones even stranger. When I hear, “...

Have you ever wondered why Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14? Perhaps the ready answer is that the quote substantiates the virgin conception and birth of Christ, which is true enough. However, the text raises a number of questions. For instance, why did God promise a virgin conceived and virgin born...

What does it mean to be a reader? What’s actually happening when someone reads a text? Ever since the rise of post-modernism these kinds of questions have been in vogue. And though many of the popular answers today are new, the questions themselves are not. In fact, he Bible itself as well as many...

Panel discussions are great. I love the unscripted “off the cuff” format because it is in those moments that you often get the best help from a speaker. I remember listening to one such discussion and the speakers were asked what three or four books in addition to their Bible they would take to a...

The news of the trial of young Arsacius Seehofer circulated quickly through Ingolstadt, Germany. He was a student at the town’s university, accused of following evangelical beliefs. The year was 1523, two years after the Diet of Worms. Martin Luther, still outlawed, had just published a German...

Sinclair Ferguson is associate minister at Saint Peter’s Church in Dundee, Scotland. He’s a long-time professor of theology, a former member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals council, and author of numerous works, including Some Pastors and Teachers, which is the subject of today’s...

Guns in Church When I was a pastor, ten years ago, I learned that a married couple, both FBI agents, joined my church. We already had two police officers in attendance, but I welcomed the news in a day when church shootings, like school shootings, were in the news. "It makes me feel safer," one...

The Church and the academy seemed to have always had an intimate, if not volatile relationship. Among the multiple results that have followed from it has been the fascinating and seminal role theology has had in the academy’s work. The Christian faith with its doctrine of the Triune God as creator...

Just before Easter 1527, Elisabeth of Brandenburg, who had become Duchess of Braunschweig-Calenberg by marriage, received some shocking news. Her mother Elisabeth of Denmark, Electress of Brandenburg, had stunned her court by taking communion after the Protestant rite: both bread and wine, without...