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Wives, Wells, and Jesus

Isaac, Jacob, and Moses all find their wives through interactions at a well. The parallels are fascinating: So that Isaac does not marry one of “the daughters of the Canaanites, (Gen. 24:3), Abraham sends out his servant to find Isaac a wife, and the servant...

More light on the Word and Spirit from Berkhof

This post is a continuation of On the Efficacy of the Sacraments and Word, Spirit, and Dry Bones, in which I have been trying to get my head around the differences between Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the relationship between the Holy Spirit, the Word of...

Word, Spirit, and Dry Bones

In a previous post, I quoted Charles Hodge’s argument that the Spirit of God alone gives efficacy to the Word and to the sacraments: There is, therefore, a strict analogy, according to the Reformed doctrine, between the Word and the sacraments as a means of...

The Lamb Alone is Worthy

In Revelation 5, John sees a vision of Almighty God seated on the throne with a book, sealed with seven seals, on his right hand. An angel issues a call to all of creation, challenging, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”, but “no...

On the Efficacy of the Sacraments

I have been studying up on the sacraments for ordination exams, and, in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, I came across an interesting contrast between how Lutheran and Reformed Christians understand the efficacy of the sacraments that I did not previously...

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