Theologia et Vita

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Sins in Sunday Clothes: The Respectable Vices We Learn to Excuse

- September 18, 2026

We tend to reserve the word sin for things loud enough to scandalize us. Murder. Adultery. Theft. Drunkenness. Apostasy. But there is another class of sins that can sit quite comfortably in a church pew: impatience, envy, resentment, ingratitude, self-pity, gossip, loveless criticism, subtle pride, discontent, and the anxious insistence on controlling what God has not put in our hands. These are sometimes called “respectable sins,” not because Scripture regards them lightly, but because we do. Their earthly consequences are not all equal, certainly, but they share the same ugly anatomy: a heart failing to love God and neighbor as it ought. Beeke and Smalley put their finger on the problem: “We are often more concerned about sin’s consequences for ourselves than its offense to God.”¹ Cornelius Plantinga approaches the same reality from another angle. Sin, he argues, is “culpable shalom-breaking,” the guilty vandalizing of the order, flourishing, communion, and peace God loves.² ...

Too Young to Be Guilty? The Age of Accountability and the Fate of Infants

- September 18, 2026

Deuteronomy 1:39 doesn't mention an age. Neither does Isaiah 7:15–16, or Jonah 4:11, or Matthew 19:14, the four texts almost every defender of the doctrine reaches for first, and not one of them fixes a birthday. "Age of accountability" is a phrase Scripture never uses, naming a category the church spent most of its history doing without. What it names is the point at which a child, previously incapable of the moral understanding sin requires, becomes capable of it, and so becomes responsible before God for personal transgression rather than merely inheriting Adam's. Below that point, however it is located, a child who dies is held by most of the tradition to die safe. Above it, the ordinary terms of the gospel apply: faith and repentance, offered to someone now able to refuse them. That definition sounds tidy until you ask what grounds it, and there the tradition splinters into at least four incompatible answers. Rome locates the child's safety in baptism and t...

Borrowed Voices: The Use and Abuse of the Church Fathers

- September 17, 2026

The phrase "Apostolic Fathers" is younger than the King James Bible. William Varner notes that it was never used in church history until J. B. Cotelier published a collection under that name in 1672, and that William Wake's English translation followed in 1693.¹ That small fact is useful to keep in mind, because "the fathers" is a category the church built after the fact. It means the pastors, bishops, apologists and theologians of roughly the first seven or eight centuries, ending with Gregory the Great (d. 604) in the Latin West and John of Damascus (d. c. 749) in the Greek East. The older textbooks gave four marks: antiquity, orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life, and the church's approval. That last mark is why Origen and Tertullian sit awkwardly on the list. The corpus is enormous. Migne's Patrologia Graeca runs to 161 volumes and the Patrologia Latina to 221. Most English readers meet the fathers in the 38 volumes of the Ante-Nicene and Nice...

Reading Forward to Emmaus: The Case for a Christotelic Hermeneutic

- September 16, 2026

At Westminster in 2016, "Christotelic" was the name of the error. Peter Lillback's introduction to Seeing Christ in All of Scripture describes the recent faculty dispute as a contest between a view that set Christ at the organic center of the whole Bible and one that "merely located Christ as the goal of Old Testament revelation."¹ Two years later Daniel Block used the same word for the remedy, reminding readers that every passage takes part in God's agenda that culminates in Christ. My own method uses it that way too. In The Craft of Systematic Theology I call the Christotelic reading of the Old Testament "a canonical necessity," since Scripture has its "hermeneutical center of gravity in the person and work of Christ."² So the word needs defending. A Christotelic hermeneutic reads the Old Testament forward, along lines the prophets themselves laid down, toward a Christ they wrote about. Westminster's worry was fair, and Tremper ...

That Verse Wasn’t Written to You. So Can You Still Apply It?

- September 16, 2026

A recent exchange under one of my devotional posts on Substack raised a good hermeneutical question. I quoted Ezekiel 36:27: “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes.” Someone rightly pointed out that Ezekiel 36 is a prophetic word with a particular historical and eschatological referent. Agreed. But then comes the question that matters whenever we open our Bibles: If a passage wasn’t originally addressed to me, in what sense may I legitimately apply it to myself? The first rule is simple, though we violate it constantly: before asking what a text means for us, ask what it meant in its own literary, historical, covenantal, and canonical setting. Abner Chou puts the matter sharply: biblical interpretation isn’t merely academic because getting Scripture right ultimately shapes how we live before God ( The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers , 2018, 13). Bernard Ramm captured the distinction in a memorable line: “Interpretation is one, application is man...

Same Christ, Different Altars: Why Rome, Byzantium, and the Reformation Never Reunited

- September 08, 2026

On October 31, 1999, in the same city where the Lutheran princes had once handed Charles V their confession, delegates of the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a document declaring that the doctrine which split Western Christendom in half was no longer church-dividing.¹ The date was chosen on purpose. So was the city. Luther had posted his theses on that day in 1517; the Augsburg Confession had been read before the emperor in 1530.² The signers meant the symbolism to say: five hundred years of anathema, undone. Cardinal Edward Cassidy signed for Rome with the Vatican's authorization; Bishop H. George Anderson signed for the American Lutherans, one voice among many from a federation spanning the globe.³ Newspapers ran the story as the end of the Reformation's oldest quarrel. Justification by faith, the article Luther called the point on which the church stands or falls ( articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae ), had apparently stopped dividing the two ...