Author: Fred Sanders
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“If a Noisome Dunghill May Covenant with a Being Most Holy:” Fletcher of Madeley
John Wesley, who everybody’s heard of, had this to say about John Fletcher of Madeley, who is now mostly forgotten: “An obedience discovered itself in Fletcher of Madeley, which I wish I could describe or imitate.” John William Fletcher (1729-1785), or, to use the French name he was given at birth, Jean Guillaume de la…
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Just How Great Are Wesley’s Hymns?
Jesus is God, but did he know during his earthly ministry that he was God? Was he, as a human, aware of his divinity? I think it is necessary, for biblical and logical reasons, to answer yes to this question, but I freely admit that doing so raises further difficult questions and forces us to…
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Ephesians as Promised Land
Henri Rossier, a nineteenth century Plymouth Brethren writer, begins his Meditations on the Book of Joshua with an arresting comparison: The Book of Joshua gives us, in type, the subject of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The journey across the desert had come to an end, and the children of Israel had now to cross…
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Michael Ward Has Found the Secret of Narnia
George MacDonald once wrote, “It is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It…
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Making Meaning in a Meaningless World: Five Ways that Won’t Work
Trapped in a world that has no meaning? Wondering what to do with your time if there’s no point to it all? Eking out a futile existence on the shreds and shards of disappointment and despair? Well, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel (why add inefficiency to futility?) Here are the five most popular…
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Modrn TheoLOLgians
Fourth in a series. Click for Early Church, Medieval, and Reformation. Heres yr modrnz. Float yr mouse ovr teh jpgs 4 namez.
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Christ Knows How to Be God (Austin Farrer)
Jesus is God, but did he know during his earthly ministry that he was God? Was he, as a human, aware of his divinity? I think it is necessary, for biblical and logical reasons, to answer yes to this question, but I freely admit that doing so raises further difficult questions and forces us to…
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God is Blessed
We should pay more attention to the doctrine of divine blessedness. I have been pondering it lately, noticing it everywhere in older theological writing, and wondering how to give this great doctrine more weight and emphasis. Beatitude, blessedness, is a divine attribute. It is a perfection of God’s being. Blessedness has occupied an ambiguous place…
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Charles “Freshly” Wesley
Here’s a cartoon left on my office door by a Torrey student. Charles Wesley turned 300 this year. Who got the mad lyrical flow? I can’t hear you…
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Every Day with God (Richard Rogers’ Seven Treatises)
Richard Rogers (1550-1618) was a Puritan pastor who noticed that people had lots of questions about how to live the Christian life. They asked very detailed and specific questions, but none of the devotional books available in his time gave correspondingly detailed answers. There were a few Roman Catholic books that got down to specifics,…
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The Lord’s Prayer in the Heidelberg Catechism
Any good catechism includes the Lord’s Prayer, broken up line by line and explained. The Heidelberg Catechism includes such a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in its final ten questions (120-129), and it is excellent. Click through to read the full discussion in question and answer format. From that discussion, I culled the basic interpretation…
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Re-Heat Your Chicken; This Dead Chicken
Reading hundreds of pages of theology every day, I was in a small group of friends in graduate school who helped each other study. We didn’t have much in common except for the looming doctoral exams, and some overlap in our reading assignments. Tired of saying “the group” is getting together, we named ourselves The…