The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Blog

  • Review of Gordon Smith’s Transforming Coversion

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    Greg Peters
    in

    In Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation (Baker Academic, 2010), Gordon Smith, president of reSource Leadership International, presents a compelling case for why the church must take seriously not only the salvation of humankind but the conversion of humankind as well. What’s the difference? Well, for Smith evangelicals have been bequeathed…

  • Thomas Aquinas' Big Pile of Straw

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (December 6) is the day in 1273 when Thomas Aquinas stopped writing. He had certainly written plenty by then. He was not yet fifty years old, but had written about a hundred works: Commentaries on Scripture, collections of patristic commentaries, sermons, philosophical treatises, explorations of disputed subjects, commentaries on Aristotle and Proclus and Boethius,…

  • The Coming Light

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    Matt Jenson
    in

    In Advent, we wait in the dark for the One who lights up the world. *** ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ (1 John 1:5) ‘What fellowship has light with darkness?’ (2 Cor. 6:14) ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and…

  • Happy Birthday, Christina Rossetti

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (December 5) is the birthday of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Rossetti is remembered these days for the Christmas lyric “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the long, strange, poem Goblin Market which launched a thousand knowing dissertations, and charming, harmless children’s verse like “Hurt no living thing:Ladybird, nor butterfly.” But Rossetti also wrote a devotional commentary on…

  • Happy Birthday, John Cotton

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (December 4) is the birthday of John Cotton (1585-1652), a Puritan pastor with a ministry in both Bostons: The Boston in Lincolnshire, England, and later the Boston in New England. He was an accomplished Cambridge University man (graduate of Trinity, fellow of Emmanuel) whose theological opinions were consistently moving in a more Puritan direction…

  • Mary Baker Eddy Seems to Have Died

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Today (December 3) is the day in 1910 when Mary Baker Eddy, who taught that evil is an illusion and death is a failure of the imagination, died. To everybody else, this kind of thing seemed rather like a refutation of her own teaching, but to her followers in the church of so-called Christian so-called…

  • Ruusbroec: Tipsy on the Trinity

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (December 2) is the anniversary of the death of Jan van Ruusbroec, also called John of Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), a 14th-century Flemish mystical writer whose work is often considered a high point of medieval Christian mysticism. In a 1984 lecture in Kentucky, Louis Dupre called him “Western Christianity’s most articulate interpreter of the trinitarian mystical…

  • Christmas Playlists

    Christmas Playlists

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    For several years, my wife and I have had a tradition of sharing our favorite Christmas music with friends. It started as actual mix tapes in the mid 90s, but has been CDs since then. We have a pretty good collection of Christmas music, and of course we have excellent taste! Here are a few…

  • We'll "Figure Out" the Trinity, Get It?

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    This January I’ll be teaching an intensive class on the Trinity as part of Biola’s innovative IRIS program. It’ll be a three-week class that I’ll be co-teaching with nine other Biola profs, intentionally stirring together as many academic disciplines as we can fit into one experience of general education. The 200 students who register for…

  • Happy Birthday, C.S. Lewis

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (November 29) is the birthday of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the professor of English who just wanted to be left alone with his books and his handful of bookish friends. But he turned out to have a headful of exactly what the world needed: Christian faith that ran deep, that embraced the whole world…

  • Happy Birthday, John Bunyan

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Today (November 28) is the birthday of John Bunyan (1628-1688). Most famous for his Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan also authored a number of theological and devotional works of lasting value. They all have that Bunyan charm: The fluency with Scripture, the lightning-quick associative leaps, the natural vigor, the homespun power of the English language. If you…

  • Happy Birthday, Robert Lowth

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    Joe Henderson
    in ,

    Robert Lowth (1710-1787) was born this day, November 27. Lowth (his name rhymes with south) was Bishop of Oxford and later London. He was best known his works on Biblical poetry and English grammar. In the 1740’s he delivered a series of lectures at Oxford that were published in 1753 as De sacra poesi Hebraeorum…