Category: Theology

Thomas Kelly, born this day (July 13) in 1769, was an evangelical Irish pastor and hymn writer. Though his piety hardly seems outlandish today, in the torpid established church of eighteenth-century Ireland, he was considered too hot to handle and too born-again to put up with. Barred from preaching in the established church, he and…

Oswald Bayer has written a really quite wonderful book, Theology the Lutheran Way, in which he makes much of Martin Luther’s sense that the theologian is one who interprets “and is interpreted by” Scripture. All Christians are theologians, according to Luther, and to be a theologian is simply to be one who hears God’s Word.…

Thomas Guthrie, born this day (July 12) in 1803, is without a doubt one of the greatest preachers on the topic of social justice in the history of evangelicalism. Guthrie led the movement to establish free schools for the poor in Scotland in the nineteenth century –Ragged Schools, as they were called. As an activist,…

John Quincy Adams (born this day, July 11, in 1767) was a Christian of an unusual kind. Raised to be Unitarian, he tended more to the Calvinist side of Congregationalism. As anti-Trinitarianism became more pronounced among the American political class, Adams clearly distinguished his own complex views about the deity of Christ from what he…

Tomorrow is John Calvin’s quincentennial birthday! He was born July 10, 1509. We’ll have a headline post from Allen Yeh on his legacy. Meanwhile from the archives, some older Scriptorium essays on Calvin: 1. The Reluctant Reformer: How Calvin got bullied into the active ministry. 2. The Terrifying Presbyterian John Calvin Mask. Print it out,…

Stephen Langton, who died on this day (July 9) in 1228, is the man most responsible for putting the chapter divisions into the Bible. Langton was one of the most prominent churchman of the thirteenth century, famous in his own time and chronicled by biographers such as Matthew Paris. He rose from being a popular…

It was on July 8, 1741 that Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon for which he is most famous, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards had already preached a different version of the sermon a month earlier at Northampton, Massachussetts, but he had strengthened the sermon in a number of ways before preaching…

Q: Will those who really believe in the imminent coming of the Lord spend their time in building big structures, even for Christian work? A: There is no reason why those who believe that the Lord may come at any time should not build the very best buildings they can for the most effective carrying…

TheoBlog reports that Martin Hengel, New Testament scholar, has died in Tübingen at the age of 82. Hengel’s scholarly accomplishment was great. His 1973 inaugural lecture in Tübingen was published in English in expanded form as The Son of God (Fortress Press, 1976). In that programmatic work he declared some of the guiding principles that…