Month: November 2006
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Peter the Fisherman Philosopher
I was invited to contribute to a Banned Book Colloquium in Biola’s library on September 25, 2006. I presented the following brief paper on the most important banned book in Biola’s history. In 1927, the second Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, John Murdoch MacInnis, wrote a book called Peter the Fisherman Philosopher:…
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Nature, Grace, and Glory
Three fundamental categories for theologizing are nature, grace, and glory. These terms indicate things you’ve already thought about before, but they don’t quite map onto other terms you might already know. Nature is what a thing is in itself. Human nature is a created good, a thing with its own integrity and a recognizable completeness…
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School of Calvary
I have a half-baked theory that evangelicalism was a much greater spiritual force about a hundred years ago. I’m not a historian or sociologist, and I don’t have a lot of interest in figuring out exactly what went wrong between our time and the golden age. It’s enough to know that sometime around the first…
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Amoebas for Jesus
Words from J.H. Jowett, written in 1910: It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings…
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Givethanksing
The turkey on the table is roasted red, and Freddy age six gives a wave so exuberant that it might take as many as six fingers to get the message across. Happy Thanksgiving from the Middlebrow gang. We’ve been on the road this week at an annual conference and are giving thanks to be back…
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Brad Stetson on Intolerably Intolerant Tolerance
Brad Stetson gave a lecture at Biola this week on the virtue of tolerance. Stetson, a PhD in social ethics from the University of Southern California, co-authored a widely-praised book on this subject last year. In just about 40 minutes, Stetson can put thoughts in your head that burn away the enveloping fog of confusion…
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Will Smith Gets Jiggy With Plato
Is public education helping our children to succeed as adults? Do today’s modern teaching methodologies actually enable our children to develop skills that facilitate their ability to flourish in society? Given that most of today’s educational models have been influenced by modernity I would say that they have been for years developing systems that are…
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In Christ (A. J. Gordon)
In 1872, Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836-1895) managed to spin a book out of two words of Scripture: In Christ . The book is a ten-chapter gem, and as an opening gambit, Gordon freely admitted that the phrase “in Christ” points to a great mystery. Though he had plenty to say in describing the ramifications and…
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Marmosets Underfoot (Decadent Conservatism)
There are some peculiar footnotes in the 1845 edition of Calvin’s Institutes translated by the industrious Henry Beveridge. The weirdest ones are the result of Beveridge double-checking his translation work by turning from the Latin Institutes to the French translation (much of which is by Calvin’s own hand). My favorite example is in Book I,…
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Teddybärkampf
At the top of a steep green hill, we see a momentary lull in the eternal battle for the teddy bear. The tall purple knight represents the Bearhead Clan, known for the severity of their discipline, the unornamented armor, and their total devotion to the face of the bear, whose emblem marks his shield. Over…
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Dorothy Sayers Advertises the Faith
Dorothy Sayers was not a theologian, and she availed herself of every opportunity to make some version of this denial public. “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists,” she wrote in 1955, and in later life she drafted a form letter of rejection to send to people who invited her to come speak on theological topics. She called…