Approved – Page 8 – Evangelical Theological Society

A National Treasure: The Overlooked Value of the Torah in the Chronicler’s Josiah Narrative

Recent scholarship has rightly challenged the long-standing tendency to access the Chronicler’s thought-world primarily through analyzing divergences from his Vorlage. However, despite this corrective, interpretation of the Josianic Reformation in 2 Chronicles 34–35 remains overly influenced by parallel readings, most explicitly observable in the persistent tendency amongst scholars to undervalue the role of the rediscovered … Read more

Literature for Literati: An Assessment of Recent Literary Claims Regarding the Gospels

While the precise dating of the Gospels has remained an area of relatively constant contention, one current within scholarship has increasingly situated the Gospels in a predominantly second century milieu. In particular, second century biographies, novels, and other literary productions associated with the Second Sophistic movement increasingly are put forward as comparanda for best understanding … Read more

Beauty in Anselm, Jonathan Edwards, and Contemporary Accounts of Atonement

According to one way of understanding God’s attributes it is best to conceive of the divine attributes as God’s nature rather than a collection of separate properties that compose God’s nature. This account of divine attributes is an entailment of one version of divine simplicity. Accordingly, God is his love, holiness, power, etc. Furthermore, we … Read more

Dispensationalism and the Covenant of Redemption

While it might sound surprising today, many of the early dispensationalists held to some form of the covenant of redemption. In the 1900’s those such as Dwight Pentecost, Lewis Sperry Chafer, R. W. Newell, and even as recently as John Walvoord, all argued for the utility of what is often called the pactum salutis. They … Read more

Time Reference in Substantival Participles as Reflected in Multi-step Descriptions

Co-authored by Linda Liu and Brian L. Webster (Dallas Theological Seminary) Reference grammars properly refer to the participle as an atemporal form (e.g., Joüon 121), in that the predicate participle becomes temporal by drawing its time reference from context. Substantival participles are generally not discussed in terms of temporality since they function as nouns. But … Read more

Neither Anti-Creedalist nor Creedalizer: Francis J. Grimké’s Black Christian Confessionalism

Francis J. Grimké (1850-1937), born enslaved, went on to study at Princeton Theological Seminary and spent most of his 50 years of ministry pastoring Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC. He is notable for many reasons, including his traditional theological commitments and the instrumental role he played in the early civil rights movement, as … Read more

Pannenberg and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 for World Christianity

Though the late German Lutheran theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014), is well-known for his rigorous academic style and critically-constructive approaches to doctrines and themes like theological anthropology, Christology, and the doctrine of the Trinity, his many ecumenically-sensitive writings about ecclesiology (within which he is arguably at his most conservative) are often overlooked and neglected. In the … Read more

Corroborating Evidence for the Antiquity of the Torah’s Hebrew

In the recent monograph, Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew (2024), Aaron Hornkohl proposes that the linguistic profile of the Torah, compared to that of the Prophets and the Writings, requires a modification to the bipolar periodization of Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) vs. Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH), widely accepted by Hebraists within biblical studies. Maintaining … Read more

Did Jesus Really Say He Was God? Understanding His Claims to Authority in Mark 14:53-65

Did the historical Jesus really claim to possess divine authority? Although there is a virtual consensus among scholars that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as divine, a key question remains: Is there continuity between this belief and Jesus’s self-claims? This paper argues that Jesus’ words at his Jewish examination were understood by his Jewish adversaries … Read more

Holy Rest: Understanding the Sabbath in the Baptist Confessional Tradition

This paper traces the development of the doctrine of the Sabbath through the history of Baptist confessions, examining how theological themes surrounding the Sabbath have been articulated, maintained, and adapted over time. By analyzing a range of widely recognized confessions among English-speaking Baptists—including the Orthodox Confession, the Second London Confession, the New Hampshire Confession, The … Read more