The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Theology

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Talker

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    Fred Sanders
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    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose birthday is today (October 21, in 1772), is remembered today as the poet who left us the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the strange fragment Kubla Khan. But in his own time he made waves as an amateur theologian. And as he remarked to a friend, his reputation was different…

  • Stuart Hamblen’s Cowboy Church of the Air

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 20) is the birthday of Stuart Hamblen (1908-1989), the cowboy singer. His story is a little bit larger than life. The public conversion of this radio star at Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade was a major media event. Hamblen had lived a rough enough life: hard drinking, playing bad guys in Western…

  • Happy Birthday to Matthew Henry: Read the Bible and Pray

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 18) is the day Matthew Henry (1662-1714) was born. The right way to celebrate his birthday is to read the Bible and pray. Henry left a literary legacy that helps you do both. His commentary on the Bible is a remarkable achievement: a one-man show, available in one volume (though the classic form…

  • Aquinas on Divine Missions

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    Fred Sanders
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    At the very end of Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the Trinity (questions 27-43 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae), he deals with the way the Son and Spirit are sent into the world by the Father. That is, he takes up the subject of the divine missions. It’s a brilliant discussion in its…

  • F. F. Bruce’s Birthday

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 12) is the birthday of Frederick Fyvie Bruce (1910-1990), a great Bible scholar who described himself as an “unhyphenated evangelical.” A collection of Bruce’s shorter writings bears the title A Mind for What Matters, and the phrase fits him well. In fact, it can be downright intimidating to read Bruce and to see…

  • Arminius the Calvinist

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 10) is the birthday of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), the Dutch theologian whose given name was Jakob Harmenszoon. If he had been American, we’d have called him Jimmy Harmenson. But he wrote theology in Latin, and for some reason it has been the latinized version of his name that caught on. We don’t call…

  • Gratitude for the Council of Chalcedon

    Gratitude for the Council of Chalcedon

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 8 ) is the day that the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon, began in 451. In a 2007 blog post about Chalcedon, I said Chalcedon means classic christology. Of course Chalcedon was a city near Constantinople, but the theological meeting held there in 451 was so important and influential that for…

  • Tyndale’s Achievement

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (October 6) is the day the martyrdom of William Tyndale in 1536 is commemorated. Tyndale changed the world with a revolutionary Bible translation that moved straight from the original languages into English with no Latin middle-man. The very words of Scripture were thus unleashed to conduct their own sovereign interrogation of the sixteenth-century church.…

  • The Trinitarian Theology of Nicky Cruz

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Nicky Cruz is not famous for his trinitarian theology. He is famous for having been the “warlord” of a violent street gang called the Mau-Maus in New York City in the 1950s, and for the dramatic story of his 1958 conversion to Christianity. At the center of his conversion story was a confrontation between this…

  • The Secret of Marriage (for Paul and Charity)

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    Fred Sanders
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    If the old-fairy-tale ending “They lived happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live…

  • “Preach the Gospel at All Times; When Necessary, Use Stigmata”

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    One of the most famous things St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) never said was, Preach the Gospel at All Times. When Necessary, Use Words. It certainly sounds like the kind of thing Francis would have said, and you can buy it on plaques and bumper stickers to your heart’s content. But he never actually said…

  • Dante Smelled of Smoke, They Say

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Today (September 14) is the day Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265 – 1321) died. Dante, author of the three-part Divine Comedy, was proud to be Italian: he wrote about the politics of Italy, chronicled his love-hate relationship with Florence, and perhaps most significantly, he wrote his masterpiece in Italian. That was a major decision in the…