Author: Fred Sanders

After posting about Cheynell’s 1650 Trinity book, I looked again at the title page and realized he didn’t publish it as a book about The Divine Triunity, but about the Divine TriNunity. As far as I can tell, he meant to spell it that way. Later readers who wrote about his book sometimes got the…

Back in the seventeenth century, you could write a book and give it a title that included most of the content. In fact, as far as I can tell, Cheynell’s Divine Triunity has a title page which is nearly a chapter long. If I were to assign this book in class, I’m sure the first…

The Gospel According to St. Hereticus Scripture Lesson for Easter “St. Hereticus” was Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001), a good old-fashioned left-leaning American theologian who published a series of satirical jabs under his heretical pseudonym for many years around the middle of the twentieth century. This piece was published in Christianity and Crisis, March 16, 1959.…

A Charles Wesley stanza from 1742: O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me! The Father’s coeternal Son bore all my sins upon the tree. Th’ immortal God for me hath died: My Lord, my Love, is crucified! Somewhere around the end of the first century (98? 117?), Ignatius…

Austin Farrer (1904-1968) wrote a little book called Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, which sparkles with his characteristic good sense and good phrasing. Here is an excerpt appropriate to the day, along with my usual warning to eat the meat and spit out the bones. In the chapter on “Sin and Redemption,” Farrer describes…

An intriguing discussion of the atonement from Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson’s 1997 Systematic Theology, Volume 1. For anyone who’s read Jenson before, it goes without saying that just because I quote him doesn’t mean I endorse his whole project. Who could possibly do that? I read Jenson for the provocation of it, and am…

The Trinity is beautiful. By common consent, great is the beauty of holiness. God himself is that beauty than which nothing greater can be desired, to give Anselm’s “maximal being theology” an aesthetic spin. Because God, unlike creatures, is not compounded of separable parts, he does not have a beauty with which to be beautified.…

Sometime in the second century, a Christian apologist (now anonymous) wrote a brief letter, addressed to someone named Diognetus, answering his questions about Christianity. This short letter is one of my favorite writings from the early church. Whoever this second-century apologist was, he has all the best things from Justin Martyr, and almost sounds like…