The Scriptorium Daily: The blog of the Torrey Honors Institute

Featured Essay / Education

Friends with Aristotle and Each Other

by Fred Sanders on May 19, 2016

Here's an episode of The Common Room, the periodic vidcast of the Torrey Honors Institute, made possible by OpenBiola. What we try to capture and share in Common Room conversations is a little bit of the ongoing dialogue that makes up the daily life of Torrey. Usually we do that…

Recent Essays

Essay / Theology

Spacious Ironies of Translation

by Fred Sanders on August 10, 2016

You have to really care about a book if you set out to translate it for the very purpose of arguing against it. There's just no way to make a decent translation without getting your hands dirty, your mind filled…

Essay / Theology

Baptism JK LOL

by Fred Sanders on August 8, 2016

If I baptize you, but I'm just kidding, are you baptized? What if both of us are children? What if it's fake church for fun? What if I grow up and become a famous bishop? Medievalist Marcia Colish has spent…

Essay / Theology

Nicene and Quicunquan Styles

by Fred Sanders on August 5, 2016

In brief presentations of the doctrine of the Trinity, we can observe two different styles. On the one hand is a kind of genetic style, which introduces the three persons in a salvation-historical framework, leading off with the Father, then…

Essay / Theology

Theologoumenal Gaskets

by Fred Sanders on July 31, 2016

To speak accurately about the triune God, theology has to indicate that he is high and lifted up, inhabits eternity, and has Holy as a name; yet simultaneously to indicate that he is intimately present with the contrite and lowly.…

Common Room on Reading Atheists

by Fred Sanders on July 27, 2016

Send your college kids to our Christian great books program and we'll make them read atheists! Why? It's a good question. There are some approaches to Christian education that would keep dangerous ideas away from the students, and would look at…

Essay / Theology

Cataphoric Understanding

by Fred Sanders on July 26, 2016

First John is a fantastic mess of looping, swirling statements with little pointer-words just pointing all over the place. The pronouns are especially peculiar. One scholar (Von Wahlde) has said that "determining the antecedents of pronouns in the First Letter…

Essay / Theology

That Good Word 'Evangelical:' Moribund or Dead

by Fred Sanders on July 24, 2016

A guest post from a shrewd observer of current events: It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing—even of a worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing—if we do not take good…

Essay / Theology

Trinity Podcast Hosted by Zaspel

by Fred Sanders on July 24, 2016

Here's a podcast organized by Fred Zaspel at Books at a Glance, in which he asks four theologians about recent controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity. The four theologians are Mike Ovey, Scott Swain, Steve Wellum, and me. I…

Essay / Theology

Shaped by the Word (Mulholland)

by Fred Sanders on July 22, 2016

The Spring 2016 issue of Biola's Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care has a brief tribute to Robert Mulholland, who died in December 2015. Editor Steve Porter puts Mulholland on the "short list of the founders of the spiritual…

Essay / Theology

A Plain Account of Trinity and Gender

by Fred Sanders on June 17, 2016

[caption id="attachment_28925" align="alignright" width="198"] Let Us Speak of This No More[/caption] The June 2016 wave of Trinity discussion online has produced some really rich essays. Just off the top of my head, with apologies for slighting anybody, the posts by…

Essay / Culture

Race and Crisis and a Sense of History

by Fred Sanders on June 15, 2016

Late in the Spring semester, life at Biola was disrupted by a shocking event: On the whiteboard wallspace over a dorm room door, somebody converted a cross to a swastika. One of the roommates in that dorm room was an…