Culture

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...

“But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:12) I begin by quoting that verse because many of you are already thinking about it. I do not blame you. It is an important and much debated verse, and the way we interpret it tends to define...

The name George Wishart is generally associated with John Knox, one of his most devout followers, who remembered him fondly in his History of the Reformation . By the time Knox heard Wishart exhorting in Leith, Scotland, on 13 December 1545, the preacher had already gained a fame as one of the most...

In Francis Bacon’s essay entitled “Of Studies” he gives the now well known dictum that “Reading makes a full man; Conference a ready man; and Writing an exact man.” The axiom is a good. Clear writing not only testifies to clear thinking, but precise writing creates precise thinking. I’ve found this...

The ‘wars’ that have raged around ‘worship’ are anything but new. Even though they may only been expressed explicitly in these terms in the recent history of the church, they are as old as the church. Indeed they are as old as our race itself. The very moment the serpent questioned the principle...

“You probably won’t have much to say until you are forty.” The words passed easily enough over the breakfast table into my ears. Then they went deeper. Their sanctifying force was acute and penetrating. They have haunted me, in the best possible way, for twenty years now. Just before I heard those...

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...

James and Jonathan welcome Pierce Taylor Hibbs. He’s the associate director of the Center for Theological Writing at Westminster Theological Seminary. Through the years, Pierce felt that writing was not only a profession--one, in which, he was trained—but also a vocation and calling, especially...

The Ten Commandments, given by God at Sinai, have played a vital role in both the Jewish and Christian faiths ever since. Indeed, given that they reflect God’s character and enshrine is perfect will for the ordering of the human race in its entirety, these ten ‘words’ have impacted the nations...