Herd Instincts in Church

We want to come to the Table in faith, and not because of superstitious attachment to ritual. At the same time, we don’t want to avoid superstitious ritual by avoiding ritual itself—that would be a superstitious attachment to the arid intellectual customs of the modern age. This stark contrast between faith and superstition can be …

No Particular Axe to Grind

In the introduction to Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, William Balke says two important things — important, that is, to the point I would like to make here. The first is that the name anabaptist results in a classic example of misdirection. “The name ‘Anabaptist,’ or ‘rebaptizer,’ picks out what actually was only an incidental …