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Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell

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Reformed Intramurals: What Neo-Calvinists Get Wrong

To a teenage boy growing up in post-Christian-before-the-term Seattle, the old Reformed Journal was a gift, like rain on dry ground. My predilection for that magazine shows either that theological persuasion is genetic, or that one can absorb far more theology than one might expect in a home far from the bastions of the Reformed world. Thinkers like Richard Mouw, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others seemed so fresh and exciting, relevant and culturally engaged. At the time names like John Calvin,…
February 1, 2008
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Interview with I. John Hesselink

OCTOBER 2007: INTERVIEW (Editors' Note: Few people have left as many fingerprints on the Reformed Church in America in recent decades as I. John Hesselink--seminary president and professor, foreign missionary and General Synod president. In addition, Hesselink has been a leading figure in Calvin and Barth studies worldwide. Perhaps most fascinating are Hesselink's "famous friends"--Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, the prominent Swiss neo-orthodox theologians, and more recently writer Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, The Death of Adam). The following interview was conducted…
October 16, 2007
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Looking for Judas

Holding a morsel of the bread that Jesus had given him, Judas exited into the darkness. Is it the same bread Jesus used that evening to initiate the Lord's Supper? The Gospel of John's account of Maundy Thursday does not include Jesus transforming the Passover feast into the Christian sacrament. But could we use the other gospel accounts to infer that it was the same, bread? If so, what would it mean for our view of Judas? Judas is the…
April 16, 2005
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Stem Cells and the Fabric of Life: How I Changed My Mind

The current presidential campaign, especially Ron Reagan Jr.'s speech at the Democratic National Convention, has brought embryonic stem cell research back to the public consciousness. Not surprisingly, but nonetheless disappointingly, the partisan rhetoric of a presidential campaign has done little to clarify this complex matter. Instead, the debate has fallen into clichéd categories and simplistic separations. Embryonic stem cells are the amazing, unique cells found in the inner cell mass of early embryos. Removing the stem cells destroys the embryo.…
October 16, 2004