The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Blog

  • Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Hot off the presses from Broadman & Holman Publishing is my book Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology. In this book, Klaus Issler and I bring together six chapters by six authors who argue that “the savior who died on the cross and rose from the dead is the eternal second person of the…

  • Moby-Dick: Inscrutable Tides

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    Fred Sanders
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    (Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.) What a book is Melville’s Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it’s a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more than enough pages making sure you know that it’s a…

  • Thank God for Dopamine

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    Paul Spears
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    As adults we realize that it is not socially acceptable to loudly complain. Parents realize that if they have a child who is constantly complaining their parental fitness will be called into question. Of course, parents want to look like they have their own house under control (yeah right) so they teach their children the…

  • God’s Glory, Triunity, and Attributes: After the Atonement

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    William Burt Pope (1822-1903) was a great British Methodist theologian of the 19th century. I’ve written an introduction to his thought and sung his praises here. One of Pope’s strengths as a theologian is that he pondered so thoroughly the way each doctrine relates to all the others. This man thought through his theology backwards…

  • Quoth the Raven: Peace!

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    Fred Sanders
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    Just after three pm on February 3, 1691, a little boy was whittling on a piece of wood outside his house, when a raven landed on the steeple of the nearby church and said to him, “Look into Colossians 3:15.” The raven said this three times. So the boy, obedient lad that he was, went…

  • The Fifth Council: Trinitarian Christology

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    Fred Sanders
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    Chalcedonian christology is hard enough: one person, two natures, three strikes you’re out. But post-chalcedonian christology? Who has time for that kind of thought project? Once you’ve decided that the theology of the early church can help you think through a biblical doctrine of who Jesus Christ is, you might be persuaded to study the…

  • What Did Jesus Believe About Scripture?

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    Scriptorium Admin
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    As a part of our discipleship, we who seek to follow the Lord Jesus desire to believe what he believed. It would be odd for one to claim, on the one hand, to be devoted to Jesus as Lord, and, on the other hand, to simply set aside as false or irrelevant a view that…

  • Peter Lombard’s Two Cents

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    Fred Sanders
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    Peter Lombard (1100-1160) was a medieval theologian whose masterwork, The Sentences, was “the enduring classic, the standard introduction to systematic theology in the medieval university curriculum,” in the words of his biographer Marcia Colish. Colish even argues that systematic theology was a twelfth-century invention in a certain sense: While there was plenty of Bible interpretation,…

  • Patriotic Picture

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    Fred Sanders
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    “It’s a grand old rag,” wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to “grand old flag.” Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky –okay, so it’s spangled with exactly two stars, but you get the…

  • (How) Do Women Sin?

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    Matt Jenson
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    Back in 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein wrote a short article called “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in which she made a simple assertion: men and women sin differently. In her own words: The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms…

  • Homer and Bluegrass

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    No, this is not a review of the great Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou, which loosely re-told Homer’s Odyssey in an Americana mode. Instead, it’s a note about the composition of those two ancient Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, that bear the name of Homer. Homeric studies took a quantum leap forward…

  • The Theology of Sleep

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    Fred Sanders
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    What in the world is sleep? You might spend as much as a third of your life in this condition, but it’s the third that most people tend to ignore. We greet each other and interact out in the waking world, but every one of us retires at night to a private time of passivity…