Author: Fred Sanders

In 1539 when John Calvin was 30, his friend Farel wrote to him with the suggestion that he had found a woman who would be perfect for Calvin to marry. Calvin wrote back, explaining that he was not especially the marrying type, and that only a certain kind of woman could possibly suit him: “Remember…

From 1927 to 1928, G. Campbell Morgan taught at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. In May of 1928, every student in residence was given a copy of his lecture entitled The Romance of the Bible. By “Romance,” Morgan did not mean “love story,” but . . . well, he explains immediately what he meant:…

Last month I got to teach Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to a group of students. I had never read the book before, so I put in some serious time reading and re-reading it (impossible structure!), watching the Fiennes/Binoche movie version (too smoochy), and reading some scholarly articles (archetypal quests, doppelgängers, King Lear, lesbianism, vampires, and…

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is rightly famous for diagnosing God as deceased, for taking the project of human self-overcoming onto his own shoulders, for praying for the advent of the Antichrist/Antinihilist, and conjuring a new post-Judaeo-Christian religion made out of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and Zarathustra yea-saying to Life, Life, Life. Whooo! A thick…

It’s hard for me to avoid the theological elements of the book, but I will exercise restraint and limit myself here to nine things that bugged me about how Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code handled the art and the career of Leonardo DaVinci. These are minor irritants compared to his handling of things like the…

John Mark Reynolds asked for examples of bad arguments mined from the plentiful quarry of The DaVinci Code. I don’t think what I’m responding to here counts as an argument, but it’s an interesting bit of incomprehension in the book. The relationship between John and Jesus is incomprehensible to Dan Brown. The gospel of John…

“It is not enough to teach the truth; it should be taught in Scripture proportions.” I spend a lot of time reading evangelicals from about 100 years ago. These people are the generation that is just getting over the death of D. L. Moody, and picking a strategy for the global, interdenominational movement of conservative…

Can a merely unitarian God answer prayer? Andrew Murray said no. In the 17th chapter of With Christ in the School of Prayer: Thoughts on our Training in the Ministry of Intercession, Murray considers “Prayer in Harmony with the Being of God,” and poses these questions: One of the secret difficulties with regard to prayer,—one…

“When matters of great moment are inquired into by men of little ability, they usually make them men of great ability.” — Augustine, Contra Academicus I.ii.6 (trans. by Denis J. Kavanagh as “Answers to Skeptics” in Writings of St. Augustine, volume 1, in the series Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (NY: Cima Publishing,…

The hardest questions I ever get about the Trinity are from kids. From “where is Jesus and why can’t we see him?” to “are God and Jesus the same person?”, I have learned to fear the kid questions more than anything the graduate students can muster. So I’m grateful for any help I can get…