The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Theology

  • 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,…

  • (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…

  • 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…

  • So Many Good Books: Wesley’s Christian Library

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    Fred Sanders
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    John Wesley lived by the Bible and claimed to be a man of one book (homo unius libri). But his single-minded focus on Scripture did not result from failing to read other books. It was something he achieved on the far side of wide reading and much learning. Wesley knew how to learn from Christians…

  • WWJD: How Could Jesus Do Miracles?

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    Scriptorium Admin
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    My conversion to Christianity occurred in November 1968. I was a junior at the University of Missouri, chaos was violently spreading across American college campuses, and it was in the early stages of the Jesus Movement. I came to Christ through the ministry of Campus Crusade and, upon my conversion, I became a pretty radical…

  • Counseling with Boethius

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    Greg Peters
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    During my graduate school years, I was fortunate to have worked on the pastoral staff at three different churches. They were all great experiences with different challenges and expectations. One element that was common to each position, however, was the need to engage at times in some form of pastoral counseling, bringing consolation to those…

  • John Wesley’s Mom Whoops Aristotle

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    Fred Sanders
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    Susanna Wesley’s (1669-1742) claim to fame is that her boys John and Charles grew up to lead a world-changing international revival movement. Her complete works have been published in a single volume. She was a full-time home-schooling mom, and didn’t write very much by scholarly standards. But what she put on paper is ample evidence…

  • Fairness, Chocolate Cake and Neurosurgery

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    Paul Spears
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    That’s not fair! When you live in a house with children you come to realize that the concept of fair/unfair is the lens through which they view most of the world. For example, when there is only one piece of chocolate cake in the house and two children you have a problem. Some parents have…

  • Susanna Wesley vs. Thomas a Kempis

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    Fred Sanders
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    Imagine what it must have been like to be the mother of John and Charles Wesley. Susanna Wesley (1669-1742) managed the task somehow, but I’m not sure how. Charles was such a busy fellow that, having decided to be a hymn-writer, he produced over 5,000 hymns. And as for John, he was driven for years…

  • Why Was Mother Teresa Sad?

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    Fred Sanders
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    Next month, a book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters will be released. Almost nobody’s read it, but everybody’s talking about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life. According to a surprisingly good article in Time, the book apparently…

  • Bringing Europe to Christ, Again

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    Greg Peters
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    On June 23 of this year, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a number of professors and rectors of European universities. In his address, the pope reminded those present that “Europe is presently experiencing a certain social instability and diffidence in the face of traditional values, yet her distinguished history and her established academic institutions have much…