Author: Fred Sanders
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Moby-Dick: Inscrutable Tides
(Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.) What a book is Melville’s Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it’s a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more than enough pages making sure you know that it’s a…
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God’s Glory, Triunity, and Attributes: After the Atonement
William Burt Pope (1822-1903) was a great British Methodist theologian of the 19th century. I’ve written an introduction to his thought and sung his praises here. One of Pope’s strengths as a theologian is that he pondered so thoroughly the way each doctrine relates to all the others. This man thought through his theology backwards…
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Quoth the Raven: Peace!
Just after three pm on February 3, 1691, a little boy was whittling on a piece of wood outside his house, when a raven landed on the steeple of the nearby church and said to him, “Look into Colossians 3:15.” The raven said this three times. So the boy, obedient lad that he was, went…
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The Fifth Council: Trinitarian Christology
Chalcedonian christology is hard enough: one person, two natures, three strikes you’re out. But post-chalcedonian christology? Who has time for that kind of thought project? Once you’ve decided that the theology of the early church can help you think through a biblical doctrine of who Jesus Christ is, you might be persuaded to study the…
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Peter Lombard’s Two Cents
Peter Lombard (1100-1160) was a medieval theologian whose masterwork, The Sentences, was “the enduring classic, the standard introduction to systematic theology in the medieval university curriculum,” in the words of his biographer Marcia Colish. Colish even argues that systematic theology was a twelfth-century invention in a certain sense: While there was plenty of Bible interpretation,…
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Patriotic Picture
“It’s a grand old rag,” wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to “grand old flag.” Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky –okay, so it’s spangled with exactly two stars, but you get the…
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Homer and Bluegrass
No, this is not a review of the great Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou, which loosely re-told Homer’s Odyssey in an Americana mode. Instead, it’s a note about the composition of those two ancient Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, that bear the name of Homer. Homeric studies took a quantum leap forward…
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The Theology of Sleep
What in the world is sleep? You might spend as much as a third of your life in this condition, but it’s the third that most people tend to ignore. We greet each other and interact out in the waking world, but every one of us retires at night to a private time of passivity…
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So Many Good Books: Wesley’s Christian Library
John Wesley lived by the Bible and claimed to be a man of one book (homo unius libri). But his single-minded focus on Scripture did not result from failing to read other books. It was something he achieved on the far side of wide reading and much learning. Wesley knew how to learn from Christians…
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Covered Wagon
Moseyin’ along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin’. The stick figure wheels keep turnin’ over, bumpin’ along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue, and the settler sings out, “My heart’s as big as…
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John Wesley’s Mom Whoops Aristotle
Susanna Wesley’s (1669-1742) claim to fame is that her boys John and Charles grew up to lead a world-changing international revival movement. Her complete works have been published in a single volume. She was a full-time home-schooling mom, and didn’t write very much by scholarly standards. But what she put on paper is ample evidence…
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Susanna Wesley vs. Thomas a Kempis
Imagine what it must have been like to be the mother of John and Charles Wesley. Susanna Wesley (1669-1742) managed the task somehow, but I’m not sure how. Charles was such a busy fellow that, having decided to be a hymn-writer, he produced over 5,000 hymns. And as for John, he was driven for years…