The Scriptorium Daily

Author: Fred Sanders

  • Karl Barth's Methodist Cleaning Service

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    Fred Sanders
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    In a 1958 essay on the future of the Methodist tradition, E. Gordon Rupp insists, with all humility and caution, there there is “something needing to be said” in modern theology and Christian witness, “which our Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Anglican friends are not saying.” What he has in mind is the aggressive, culture-transforming edge…

  • Galatians Memory Verses

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    Fred Sanders
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    I get to spend the middle part of the summer studying Galatians for a class I’m co-teaching in Cambridge. I don’t have time to undertake a major memorization program (like learning the whole book by heart), but here are the verses I think will be best to commit to memory. I chose these because they…

  • Paul: "The Veiled Energy of Metaphor and Allusion"

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    Fred Sanders
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    Richard Hays (from his 2001 intro to the 2nd ed. of Faith of Jesus Christ) gives some great advice on how to read Paul: “Paul, the missionary preacher, is at least as much a poet as he is a theologian.” And Hays doesn’t just mean in the mind-blowing passages like Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians…

  • Baptism of Aethelbert

    Baptism of Aethelbert

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (June 2) is the day King Aethelbert of Kent was baptized into the Christian faith by Augustine of Canterbury in the year 597. Bede tells us that Aethelbert “was the third English king to become High-King (Bretwalda) of all the provinces south of the river Humber, but he was the first to enter the…

  • What was the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge?

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    Fred Sanders
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    The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge was, and still is, a Bible reference work first published around 1830, created by the London publisher Samuel Bagster (1772-1851). It is a deluxe set of cross-references. That is, the TSK consists entirely of a book-length listing of cross-references, showing only the chapter and verse citations, without any accompanying text.…

  • How to Read a Spiritual Book (Wesley)

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    Fred Sanders
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    In 1735, John Wesley published an abridgment of Thomas a Kempis’ classic 1441 book The Imitation of Christ. Wesley’s edition was called The Christian’s Pattern. By way of introduction, Wesley gave his readers a short set of directions “concerning the manner of reading this (or any other) religious treatise.” The instructions were not quite of…

  • Timothy Ward, Words of Life

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    Fred Sanders
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    I can imagine a better book on the doctrine of Scripture, but that’s just because I’m imaginative. I cannot actually find a better book than Timothy Ward’s Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God. This is the best thing out there, the one to use in class, the one to…

  • Illuminated Manuscript w/Dragon

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    Fred Sanders
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    The church bulletin featured a photomontage based on Jean-Francois Millet’s 1857 painting The Angelus. But Freddy Age Ten, perhaps influenced by the recent craze for street art, added a little something. The average viewer thinks of this descending dragon as a menacing presence, perhaps as extra motivation to pray harder. Perhaps he is one of…

  • Deep Things Roundup

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    Fred Sanders
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    It’s been a couple of months since I posted anything about my book The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, but the book continues to make the rounds and find new readers. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from recent times. Check out Crossway’s nifty 90-second trailer for the book:…

  • The Most Helpful Matthew Commentaries

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    Fred Sanders
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    As soon as a teaching semester ends I begin excavations on my desk, digging through the layers of books to find the desk itself. This semester I got to teach the gospel of Matthew at the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles, so a thick growth of Matthean reference works needs to be cleared away…

  • Prayer for the Class of 2011

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    Fred Sanders
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    Father in heaven, Lord of hosts, God of Israel: you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You are the God, you alone, who made these students and gave them to us for a season. We pray for them today in the same way as King Hezekiah prayed for his…

  • #NotReallyHeresy

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    Fred Sanders
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    A few weeks ago I started a silly hashtag at my Twitter account (fredfredsanders), describing heresies in a way that totally missed the point but somehow were instructive anyway. It didn’t exactly trend, as they say, and I ran out of ideas after about a dozen. But if you’re into terrible puns on recondite topics,…