Always Bright and Shiny

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, St. Paul tells us, but rather against principalities and powers. These principalities have an embodiment and manifestation in the worldly power structures that surround us, and it is therefore a central responsibility of ours to assemble in worship of the triune God. This is because worship of Almighty …

Gracious Eating and Drinking

The Lord’s Supper is made up of participles—eating and drinking. The Lord’s Supper is not made up of material elements—bread and wine. The bread and wine are a necessary part of it, certainly, but the partaking of Christ happens in the action, motivated by evangelical faith. But the common life, the koinonia, the partaking together, …

Neither Dead Works Nor Dead Faith

Faith is a gift of God, lest any man should boast. With and in this faith, all of life is sacramental, and the two sacraments proper are clear and unobstructed meetings with God in Christ. But without faith, everything becomes blurry, and religion is reduced in principle to shamanism. The faith that God gives is …

Making the World Safe for Fornication

“Peggy Noonan concluded after looking at public policy crusades during the twentieth century, that the real goal of every liberal movement is to ‘make the world safe for fornication.’ Get enough fornication going and you get a lot of people too frightened to approach God because of their guilt . . . As with the …

Table Talk

I have been asked to comment on the following statement, taken from the October edition of Table Talk. “Other revisions or rejections of orthodox covenant theology include the so-called Federal Vision movement that not only rejects the covenant of redemption; it rejects the distinction between law and gospel and the distinction between the covenants of …