Author: Fred Sanders
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“Boece” by Theseus and Chanticleer
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) loved Boethius (480-524). Not only did Chaucer make a complete translation of “Boece’s Concolacione Philosophie,” he cited Boethius frequently. Partly to prove he was a learned man, Chaucer would haul out a few lines of Boethius anytime he needed a character to say something philosophical. So it’s no surprise that at…
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The Trinity between OT and NT
In the fullness of time, the one God revealed that he eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine. But if you ask where the Trinity is clearly declared in scripture, you should take care to avoid certain common errors. One error is to dive…
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Fraught: Chaucer’s Mediocrism
To ask about Chaucer’s religion is a little thickheaded, because the main thing about Chaucer is his distance from religion. He’s important in the history of English lit partly because he’s “the first great secular poet in English,” and if we wanted to read religious literature from the 14th century, we could go read that…
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Lear at the High Table
Last Friday I had the chance to get together with the other profs in my department, including adjuncts and a few teachers from Torrey Academy, and talk about King Lear for three hours. We call these meetings “High Table” meetings, because in them we do exactly what our students do, with the same texts for…
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Mysteries of the Life of Christ (A good idea is a good idea)
When a theologian comes up with a way of structuring the presentation of Christian doctrine, sometimes it just catches on and gets used by theologians of very different traditions. Take as an example John Calvin’s way of describing Christ’s work as the mediator: reflecting on “Christ” as “the anointed one,” Calvin asked, “what kind of…
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100 Year Old Evangelicalism
The Washington Post ran a story recently about Rick Warren, bestselling megachurch superpastor. What caught my ear was one of the Warren lines quoted in the piece: “One of my goals is to take evangelicals back a century, to the 19th century,” said Warren … “That was a time of muscular Christianity that cared about…
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Amanda Smith Gets the Trinity
Evangelicals have long wrestled with the problem of having the doctrine of the Trinity functioning in their lives as an intellectual problem rather than as the confession of an experienced reality (see previous posts on Bunyan and Watts). This tension has come to expression repeatedly in the devotional life of evangelicals. As I have scanned…
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Watts Pleads with the Trinity
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is demonstrably a trinitarian, but he felt a tremendous tension over the doctrine. In his time there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was truly scriptural (for a blow-by-blow account of trinitarian fights in English in the seventeenth century, see Philip Dixon’s book Nice and Hot Disputes). Watts was…
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Psalm 28: Suddenly Frogs
Midrash Tehillim, the set of medieval rabbinic comments on the Psalms, sometimes delivers powerful and illuminating insights into the Psalms. Other times, it delivers powerful and illuminating insights into something else altogether –other parts of scripture, apparently unrelated except maybe by one verbal parallel. The rabbis knew how to do commentary on literal meaning, but…
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Bunyan’s Weighty Thoughts
John Bunyan (1628-1688) believed in the Trinity, and referred to the doctrine throughout his writings. But he devoted only one extended meditation to it, a piece entitled “Of the TRINITY and a CHRISTIAN,” whose title suggests an interest in something practical and perhaps edifying. The descriptive sub-title specifies that it is about “How a young…
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Schleiermacher: Trinity and Redemption
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was never persuaded that the doctrine of the Trinity had anything to do with the gospel. It is common enough to blame Schleiermacher for his role in marginalizing the doctrine of the Trinity: He famously placed the doctrine at the very end of his work The Christian Faith, making it something of…
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“Protestant” Etymology
I keep hearing that “Protestants” are by definition people who “protest,” that is, people defined by their disagreement with something, their dissent, their rejection of something. It is, in other words, considered a term of negation. Now, I don’t make much of this, but it seems to me like a bit of bogus etymology. “Protest”…