Category: Theology
-
Today is Thomas Merton’s Birthday
Thomas Merton was born on this day in 1915. Merton’s autobiography Seven Storey Mountain has been a book that has helped many people find their way to Christian faith, or at least to feel the attraction of it. Merton’s persuasiveness came partly from his oddness: A well-educated cosmopolitan type who had lived a fairly dissolute…
-
Today is Francis Schaeffer’s Birthday
Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) has been gone for a quarter of a century now, and responsible evaluation of his impact on Christian culture is just getting underway. Two major biographies have been published recently: Barry Hankins’ Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Eerdmans, 2009) and Colin Duriez’s Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Crossway, 2008).…
-
Hearing the Echoes
This week in church we prayed Psalm 130 together: “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sin, O Lord, who would stand?” Well, actually, we prayed together through an extended paraphrase of it written by John Owen, the 17th-century Puritan theologian who wrote a great big book on that one little psalm that was…
-
Today Pope Benedict XII Explained the Beatific Vision (1336)
On January 29, 1336, Pope Benedict XII issued a letter which made official pronouncements on a controversy that had been raging for several decades. The letter was Benedictus Deus, and it sorted out the following problem: When people die, their souls leave their bodies. That’s their personal eschatology, their own endings. But the world goes…
-
Today is R. A. Torrey’s Birthday (1856)
R.A. Torrey was a big deal about 100 years ago, and he still is. Though he was already world-famous when he came to us, he was the first academic dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and once wrote that he had given this school “twelve of the best years of his life” (1912-1924).…
-
Today Pelagianism Was Condemned (417)
“Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis!” prayed Augustine: “Give what you command, and command what you will!” This line from Book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions is a perfect crystallization of Augustine’s recognition that he was desperately in need of God’s grace: “My whole hope is in thy exceeding great mercy and that alone. Give…
-
When Shall We Be Made Like Our Christ?
Q: When will the full change (begun in us by the change in heart) be completed? That is, when shall we be made like our Christ? A: The moment that one is born again by the power of the Holy Ghost, he is made in a measure like Christ. In his standing before God, he…
-
High Table: Luther
Our reading assignment: Martin Luther’s “Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation,” “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” and “The Freedom of the Christian” from Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings. Faculty training at the Torrey Honors Institute puts our pedagogy to the test. We call our semesterly training meetings “High Tables.” Nothing as lofty as it sounds, we read…
-
Today the Council of Trent was Accepted by Pope Pius IV
Though the council of Trent was an event that sprawled over 18 years with long gaps between sessions (1545-1563), its canons and decrees were made official when the Pope received and ratified them by issuing a bull entitled Benedictus Deus on this date, January 26, 1564. The most headline-making issues at Trent had to do…
-
Today Gregory of Nazianzus Died (389)
Gregory of Nazianzus is among the most important and influential of the church fathers, as can be seen from the rank he occupies in no less than three traditional honorific triads. The first triad with which Gregory is associated is the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. The work…
-
Today is John Donne’s Birthday
Today in 1572, John Donne was born. Donne was equally powerful as a poet and as a preacher, because in both roles he exercised an apparently absolute mastery over the English language. In his 1999 book The Theology of John Donne, Jeffrey Johnson argues that “the doctrine of the Trinity is for Donne the seminal…
-
Today is Carl Henry’s Birthday
Carl F. H. Henry was born on January 22, 1913. He has only been dead for a few years now (since late 2003), and it’s still a little hard to believe he’s gone. Henry stamped his identity onto some of the central institutions of the evangelical establishment: Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller…