Author: Fred Sanders
-
Co-Everything
When Paul wants to describe salvation, he tells what happened to Jesus, and then annexes believers to that. We died with Christ, were raised with Christ, and are alive together in Christ. Paul even found the shortest possible way of making this point: By taking the main verbs of the story of Jesus and putting…
-
William Booth’s Army of Salvation
William Booth (born today, April 10, 1829; died 1912) came out of nowhere, or out of “darkest England” as he called it, and did more good in one lifetime than could reasonably be expected from one man, even a man with so remarkable a wife as his Catherine. In 1890 Henry Morton Stanley thrilled England…
-
No One Takes My Life From Me; I Have Authority to Lay it Down
This is one of my favorite images of Christ and the cross. It is not a historically accurate photo of what happened on Good Friday. Jesus didn’t climb a ladder to get onto the cross. But this image tells that Jesus was the active one, the agent, in the atonement that took place between God…
-
The Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: April 9, 1945
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (born 1906) was executed on this day, April 9, in 1945. He had been involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged for that political action. He was plotting murder and got caught; there were non-Christians undertaking the same action. His death is hardly the stuff of straightforward martyrdom, hardly as…
-
God Keep Thee, Freddy, In the World
My Freddy, when I look on thee, So pure, so guileless, and so gay, With sunny smile and eye of blue, Clear as the blushing dawn of day — I think how lovely is the trust Which God to man has largely given; So beauteous is the fallen dust, With yet within a spark from…
-
Cast Away (F. B. Meyer)
“If I had a hundred lives, they should be at Christ’s disposal,” said F. B. Meyer (born today, April 8, 1847; died 1929), a great Baptist minister who flourished about a century ago. Bob Holman has just published (and I have not yet read) a biography of Meyer, taking that statement as its subtitle: F.B.…
-
C. H. Dodd and Realized Eschatology
C. H. Dodd (born this day, April 7, 1884; died 1973) was a major twentieth-century New Testament scholar. He wrote on many topics, but his name is mostly associated with the idea of realized eschatology. If eschatology is the doctrine of the final things (eschaton being the Greek word for “last”), then realized eschatology is…
-
Albrecht Dürer, Northern Renaissance Man
Albrecht Dürer (born 1471, died on this day, April 6, in 1528) was widely hailed as the greatest artist of his generation in the northern Renaissance. All kinds of voluptuous shenanigans were going on in the wonderful world of the southern Renaissance, but if you want that stern, northern sensibility, it’s hard to beat Dürer…
-
Gerhard Tersteegen (1697-1769), Pietist
Today is the anniversary of the death of Gerhard Tersteegen (born 1697, died April 3, 1769), the most pious pietist of pietism’s piousness. Somehow, the words “pious” and “pietism” have been turned into dirty words in contemporary usage. I don’t know how that happened to perfectly good words. Maybe where you live, you are suffocating…
-
Mordecai Ham Tried to Baptize a Cat
When he was a seven year old boy in Kentucky, Mordecai F. Ham (born today, April 2, 1877, died 1961) tried to “immerse an old tomcat in a rain trough, and when the subject vented all its feline ferocity in objecting to the ‘baptism,’ little Mordecai threw him down with the disgusted explanation, ‘Go on,…
-
The Best Book on Jesus’ Divinity
Many months ago, Ed Komoszewski wrote to me and asked if I might be interested in seeing a forthcoming book he had recently finished co-authoring with Rob Bowman. It was on the deity of Christ; I was interested; he sent me page proofs; I loved it. The book was Putting Jesus in His Place: The…
-
David Brainerd Went to the Indians (1743)
It was on April 1, 1743, that David Brainerd (1718-1747) went out into the American wilderness to be a missionary to the Native Americans. Brainerd’s influence on world missions has been enormous, but it has all been through Jonathan Edwards’ posthumous publication of his notes and journals. As edited by Edwards, the Life of Brainerd…