Category: Misc.

A Charles Wesley stanza from 1742: O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me! The Father’s coeternal Son bore all my sins upon the tree. Th’ immortal God for me hath died: My Lord, my Love, is crucified! Somewhere around the end of the first century (98? 117?), Ignatius…

Austin Farrer (1904-1968) wrote a little book called Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, which sparkles with his characteristic good sense and good phrasing. Here is an excerpt appropriate to the day, along with my usual warning to eat the meat and spit out the bones. In the chapter on “Sin and Redemption,” Farrer describes…

An intriguing discussion of the atonement from Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson’s 1997 Systematic Theology, Volume 1. For anyone who’s read Jenson before, it goes without saying that just because I quote him doesn’t mean I endorse his whole project. Who could possibly do that? I read Jenson for the provocation of it, and am…

The Trinity is beautiful. By common consent, great is the beauty of holiness. God himself is that beauty than which nothing greater can be desired, to give Anselm’s “maximal being theology” an aesthetic spin. Because God, unlike creatures, is not compounded of separable parts, he does not have a beauty with which to be beautified.…

Sometime in the second century, a Christian apologist (now anonymous) wrote a brief letter, addressed to someone named Diognetus, answering his questions about Christianity. This short letter is one of my favorite writings from the early church. Whoever this second-century apologist was, he has all the best things from Justin Martyr, and almost sounds like…

In 1539 when John Calvin was 30, his friend Farel wrote to him with the suggestion that he had found a woman who would be perfect for Calvin to marry. Calvin wrote back, explaining that he was not especially the marrying type, and that only a certain kind of woman could possibly suit him: “Remember…

From 1927 to 1928, G. Campbell Morgan taught at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. In May of 1928, every student in residence was given a copy of his lecture entitled The Romance of the Bible. By “Romance,” Morgan did not mean “love story,” but . . . well, he explains immediately what he meant:…

Last month I got to teach Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to a group of students. I had never read the book before, so I put in some serious time reading and re-reading it (impossible structure!), watching the Fiennes/Binoche movie version (too smoochy), and reading some scholarly articles (archetypal quests, doppelgängers, King Lear, lesbianism, vampires, and…

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is rightly famous for diagnosing God as deceased, for taking the project of human self-overcoming onto his own shoulders, for praying for the advent of the Antichrist/Antinihilist, and conjuring a new post-Judaeo-Christian religion made out of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and Zarathustra yea-saying to Life, Life, Life. Whooo! A thick…

It’s hard for me to avoid the theological elements of the book, but I will exercise restraint and limit myself here to nine things that bugged me about how Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code handled the art and the career of Leonardo DaVinci. These are minor irritants compared to his handling of things like the…

John Mark Reynolds asked for examples of bad arguments mined from the plentiful quarry of The DaVinci Code. I don’t think what I’m responding to here counts as an argument, but it’s an interesting bit of incomprehension in the book. The relationship between John and Jesus is incomprehensible to Dan Brown. The gospel of John…

“It is not enough to teach the truth; it should be taught in Scripture proportions.” I spend a lot of time reading evangelicals from about 100 years ago. These people are the generation that is just getting over the death of D. L. Moody, and picking a strategy for the global, interdenominational movement of conservative…