Category: Theology

Adolphe Monod (1802 – 1856), delivered a sermon on the Trinity from his sickbed as he came within the month of his death. His text was Romans 8:12-17, and two most arresting paragraphs for me are these: Holy Scripture is wise, even in its silence. You would look in vain therein for the word Trinity,…

Here is something which I suspect I have said before. But when John Henry Newman (1801-1890) says something, it always sounds a lot better than when anybody else says it. I found it on the last page of Andrew Louth’s odd little book Discerning the Mystery (1983), and Louth’s footnote places it in Newman’s Sermons,…

Baptist theologian John Gill (1697 – 1771), in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity, has an especially clear presentation of human salvation as grounded in the eternal God. This is a topic I have been trying to learn more about by studying Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679), but right now I find that Goodwin’s writing gives off too…

Claude Beaufort Moss (whose birth and death dates I cannot find) was a 20th-century Anglican theologian whose textbook, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, has been frequently reprinted. I’m nominating this book for Worst Opening Sentences Of A Systematic Theology Book Ever. Here he goes: What is Theology? It is the science of…

Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: “Yahweh is my light,” but then extended differently: “and my salvation… my strength.” The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King…

See the other posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. For penetrating insight into the character of Old Testament revelation, there are few scholars of the caliber of Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889). Edersheim was a Viennese-born Jew who converted to Christianity under the ministry of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and he turned that unique…

See the other posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) once said that a true poem would still be poetical even if you rearranged all the words in it. Or perhaps what he said was that a good poet would still be poetical…

John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Every day the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. For those of Western European ancestry, like myself, it is to the East that we owe the coming of the True Light: Jesus Christ. From the East came Peter, prince of the Apostles. From the East came the…

John Mark Reynolds, 2005. When I was a boy one of my favorite songs was Power in the Blood: There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the blood of the Lamb; There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the precious blood of the Lamb. How true this is! Every Sunday, Holy Communion brings…

John Mark Reynolds, 2005. One of the glories of Christianity is the way the Holy Spirit has provided for the integration of practical piety, the life of the church, and theology. No place is this more evident than in the issue of repentance. According to Williston Walker, the early Church faced a difficult issue with…

John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Monastaries often get an undeserved bad reputation. Chaucer may have something to do with it or the fact that our culture cannot imagine real community and giving things up. If you believe, as I do, that the culture is in real trouble, then monasticism looks more appealing. There are forms of…