The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Blog

  • Principles Poll Badly

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    Paul Spears
    in ,

    Imagine a world where slavery is still a normal part of our daily lives. What if the North under Abraham Lincoln’s presidency assented to the demands of the Southern states and allowed for both the continuation of slavery and the creation of new slave states? If Lincoln was the kind of man who was moved…

  • Fifty Love Songs to the Bible (G. Campbell Morgan’s Hymnal)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    People claim to believe all kinds of things, but if you want to find out what they really believe, see what they can sing about. As I’ve tried to identify what the great evangelical tradition has believed about Scripture, I have found plenty of arguments, manifestos, controversies, and declarations. But I also found a hymnal…

  • How Did Jesus Train?

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    Scriptorium Admin
    in ,

    Jesus lived and acted as a human being filled with the Holy Spirit in dependence on His Father’s leading. Throughout His incarnation, he voluntarily refrained from employing his divine nature (Philippians 2:5-11). He thereby becomes a real example for us to follow. Accordingly, Paul can say without blinking an eye, “Follow me as I follow…

  • The Sense that Miracles Make

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Miracles are all about getting attention. The miracles reported in the Bible are no exception, and are sometimes designated as signs and wonders, that is, pointers and shocks. The miracles that Jesus Christ did during his earthly ministry bear this twofold structure prominently: they startle and indicate; they shock and they point to something. What…

  • Exhortation to the Students Upon Their Return to the University after the Vacation (Bishop Robert Leighton)

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Summer is over and the students are icumen in. For all who are returning to campuses to take up again the sober business of learning, here is a little gem from the great evangelical bishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684). I publish it here without any extra comment, because I hardly know what to add to words…

  • B.R.I.G.H.T.Y.

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Freddy Age Seven turns his attention to the Brighty mythos, and decides that no straightforward illustration can capture it. Instead he approaches this epic with an entire suite of artistic approaches. His first attempt at communicating the power of Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon makes the Grand Canyon itself the star of the…

  • Life in the Fundamentalist Word (Philip Mauro)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    It’s not news to anybody that the evangelical tradition has a high doctrine of Scripture, but a lot of contemporary evangelicals seem to have forgotten what originally generated this commitment to Scripture: the characteristic evangelical experience of God’s power and authority in the text of the Bible. In fact, one of the cherished affirmations of…

  • “That God Himself May Through His Word Speak” (Adolph Saphir)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    I know it disagrees with conventional wisdom, but I am persuaded that evangelical Christianity has always had a recognizable way of approaching the Bible, and that this approach has been tacitly trinitarian. To demonstrate this, I could cite a number of contemporary theologians who are proudly developing their accounts of Scripture in an increasingly trinitarian…

  • Scripture as the Voice of the Triune God

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Evangelical Christians are the most thoroughly trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by an applied trinitarian theology which took more seriously than ever before the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life. Nothing we as evangelicals do makes…

  • How Did Jesus Act?: Jesus as a Moral Teacher

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    by

    Scriptorium Admin
    in ,

    It has long been recognized that, irrespective of one’s religious views about Jesus of Nazareth, he is one of the world’s leading ethical thinkers and teachers. Indeed, as late as the second world war, most moral thinkers in the West—secular or not—did their best to show that their moral theories yielded results in keeping with…

  • Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From Brighty of the Grand Canyon

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Marguerite Henry wrote a whole Horseshoe Library set of books about horses, but it is her book about a Donkey that has been a major topic of discussion around my house this summer. Henry’s 1953 book Brighty of the Grand Canyon was a great companion for us before, during, and after a family vacation to…

  • Harry Potter is Dreadful and Vulgar

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    Paul Spears
    in

    Everyone has something to say about Harry Potter. It is such a major phenomenon that people can’t keep themselves from talking about it, but in truth Harry Potter is dreadful and vulgar—and that is not a bad thing. My first encounter with Harry Potter books began seven years ago because of the firestorm of controversy…