The Scriptorium Daily

Author: Fred Sanders

  • Our Triune God & The Pastor: Adoption Conference

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Astute theological observers should have noticed by  now that there are two important things happening with regard to adoption. On the theological front, including biblical studies, systematic theology, and pastoral counseling, the doctrine of adoption is becoming more prominent and getting more attention. There are more books and articles devoted to various aspects of it,…

  • Sermon: The Trinity as Surprise Ending

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    Fred Sanders
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    Last weekend I guest preached at Del Rey Church, on the Trinity. The sermon is available online, and you can view it below or at their site (where you can also download the audio). I’m warning you, it’s 50 minutes long (pastor Matt Jones has that congregation prepped for substantial sermons!) and it’s only on one…

  • God the Father's Sons and Offspring

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    Fred Sanders
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                      I’ve been reading about the doctrine of God the Father, a doctrine which has no handy name. Following the model of christology (the doctrine about Jesus Christ) and pneumatology (the doctrine about the Holy Spirit), we ought to call it patrology, but that word is already…

  • "I Believe in the Maker of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods"

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Katherine Sonderegger has a fine chapter on the doctrine of creation in the book Mapping Modern Theology. I especially appreciate the fact that, charged with explaining in about 23 pages how the doctrine of creation has been treated during the entire modern period, she manages to cover the main topics, mention the standard names, sketch…

  • Faith and Good Works, Christ and the Spirit

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    Fred Sanders
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    Justification is by grace alone through faith alone. It’s a wonderful truth, established by Paul,  classically recovered and emphasized by the Reformers. But as the Reformers learned in the sixteenth century, and as Protestants ought always to keep in mind when teaching this great doctrine, it is open to unhelpful mis-interpretation by those who would…

  • O Tell Us, Poet, What You Do

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    A favorite Rilke poem: O tell us, poet, what you do. –I praise. Yes, but the deadly and the monstrous phase, how do you take it, how resist? –I praise. But the anonymous, the nameless maze, how summon it, how call it, poet? –I praise. What right is yours, in all these varied ways, under…

  • A.T. Pierson's Biola Connections

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    Fred Sanders
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    I was asked recently about the relationship between A. T. Pierson (1837 -1911) and the early years of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. I am not aware of any direct connection –Pierson never worked at BIOLA, for example. But Pierson and Biola’s founders were the same kind of people, devoted to the same things, and…

  • Jesus Loves Karl Barth

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    Fred Sanders
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    A witty colleague writes: I know “Jesus loves me, This I know,” is the most important thing Karl Barth ever wrote, but when I googled it, I came up with more questions than answers. Was he asked to give the “answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?” or “his most profound theological concept” or to…

  • STUDY at BIOLA (1941)

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    Fred Sanders
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    I don’t have an image of it, but here is the nifty text from an ad in Biola’s King’s Business magazine from August 1941, p. 307. The ad invites prospective students to come to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which had not yet started using the neologism “Biola” but occasionally did refer to itself…

  • A Statue You Can't See. Also, Upside Down.

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    What good is a statue nobody can see? In a courtyard in Cambridge, England (just beside the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences) is a pair of iron footprints. Over the last few summers, I’ve seen these footprints dozens of times. I’ve wondered what they were pointing toward or away from, I’ve joked with my kids…

  • Unhelpful Advice from Samuel Johnson

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    Fred Sanders
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    Samuel Johnson is one of the acknowledged masters of English prose, a fixed star of style. As you might expect from the author of a dictionary, Johnson was master of a vast vocabulary, concatenating his words into characteristically long sentences. Those sentences! They are complex periodic constructions, piled high, triple-knotted, exquisitely balanced, and crafted to lead…

  • Delighting in the Good (Triune) God

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    There’s a nice little book on the Trinity coming out soon, and I highly recommend it as a zippy intro to my favorite subject. The book is Delighting in the Trinity, by Michael Reeves, and here’s what I already said about it as a back-cover blurb: If you have ever felt that the doctrine of…