Author: Fred Sanders

Here is one big idea about the resurrection for you: The Father gives life to the Son. We know it happened when Christ left the tomb behind. He emerged from darkness and death into everlasting life because the Father had given him life. Christ is risen because the Father gave life to him so fully, so…

In medieval England there was a unique part of the Good Friday service called “creeping to the cross.” It was a ritual procession that involved approaching the cross barefoot and on your knees. Being on your knees like that, “creeping,” is a physical expression of reverence, of humility, and of slowness. Reverence, because you’re on…

The Reformation (rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) wasn’t a total break from the Christian past; not a clean start; not a do-over from scratch. For the early Protestants, the whole point of reforming the church was to find a way of standing in continuity with the great ancient church by being biblical, apostolic, and universal.…

On April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote out by hand the document we know as the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and now recognize as a classic text of American history, of civil rights history, of religious history. King was in jail for leading nonviolent protests against racial injustice in Birmingham, but what…

Christians have long claimed that they got the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible itself. While admitting that they had rendered the doctrine more explicit, and also admitting that they had crafted a set of non-biblical terms (like person, nature, triune, etc.) to help them articulate it with more clarity and brevity, they insisted…

The inch-tall fragment of Coptic papyrus that includes the words “Jesus said unto them… my wife” has had quite a career so far. It’s got its own webpage at Harvard Divinity School; it grabs headlines and sparks imaginations; it got radiocarbon dated as “probably really, really ancient (probably);” and generally gets vastly more attention than…

There’s an old joke, “How do you say ‘Happy Easter’ in Russian?” Answer: “Christ is Risen.” It’s a good joke, because it shocks by re-intruding the religious content into a word (Easter) that does a good job sounding, to most of its users, more neutral than religious. Somewhere in the long, strange history of the…

“It’s the Bible that saves us!” Why do we talk that way? Actually, I know why. I recently heard a very good sermon about the Bible. It was based on Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus, where the rich man begs to be allowed to return from his afterlife torment to warn his…

Old Testament scholar Rolf Rendtorff died this week.  Rendtorff spent most of his career at the University of Heidelberg. He was a diligent scholar who was able to pursue the largest questions in his field without losing his grip on all the details. He had a knack for biblical exposition that kept his work fairly…

There is a very close connection between The Fundamentals (published 1910-1915) and Biola’s magazine  The King’s Business (published from 1910-1970). One way to describe that connection is to say that they grew from the same root: from the same editors and funders during the same period. Another way to describe it is to say that…