The Scriptorium Daily

Search results for: “baptism of christ”

  • Today Gregory of Nazianzus Died (389)

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    Fred Sanders
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    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 MLK’s Actual Birthday

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    Fred Sanders
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    As a Federal holiday, MLK Day falls on the third Monday of January, which is a different date every year. But today, January 15, is the actual anniversary of his birth. “I Have A Dream” is overwhelmingly his most famous speech, just as the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is his most famous writing. The…

  • Today William Laud was Beheaded (1645)

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    William Laud was the Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I. He was a devout and learned Christian with many good qualities, but as the leading bishop of the Church of England in turbulent times, he adopted authoritarian strategies that put him on a collision course with the equally intransigent Puritans. In the general mess of…

  • Today is Zwingli’s Birthday

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today in 1484, Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli was born, about 40 days after Martin Luther. Zwingli was a well-trained scholar (Universities of Vienna and Basel) and had the early reputation of being the best Greek student north of the Alps. But he was essentially a man of action, and when he began his preaching ministry…

  • The Gist of the Lesson

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    R. A. Torrey wrote dozens of books, oversaw academics at the two greatest Bible Institutes in America, and carried out a round-the-world preaching tour that made headlines in big cities on five continents. He was a busy man and he worked on a grand scale. But while serving as the international celebrity for evangelical Christianity,…

  • R. A. Torrey’s Greatest Sermons

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    R. A. Torrey (1856-1928) was the most important evangelist between Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. In the eighty years since his death, his fame has declined, so that he is no longer a household name. But his name is still powerful: you can hardly find a Christian bookstore so vacuous that it doesn’t sell…

  • Oscillating, Not Vacillating: Simeon at Both Extremes

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Charles Simeon knew the secret of staying centered on the Gospel even when the centrifugal forces of controversy conspired to knock him off balance. His approach was classically described by HCG Moule in his Simeon biography (starting around page 96). Simeon’s main goal in all his preaching was to emphasize what God wanted emphasized, and…

  • Worldview Anomalies, Recalcitrant Facts and the Image of God

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    Scriptorium Admin
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    Once upon a time there was a man who thought he was dead. His wife tried everything she could to convince him he was very much alive. But try as she may, he would not change his mind. After several weeks of this, she finally took him to the doctor who assured the man he…

  • Catholicity, Race and Sunday Morning

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    Matt Jenson
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    For the last 1600 years, Christians have confessed belief in the ‘one holy catholic and apostolic church’. The ‘catholic’ bit of that confession makes many Protestants fidgety, but it need not. Its etymology renders it simply ‘according to the whole’. Catholicity gets at the universal character of the church, and it does so by two…

  • You Can’t Spell

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    At a party recently, all the kids discovered a tetherball post in the host’s backyard. Waiting for the inevitable minor head injury that was sure to follow, I was musing pessimistically, “you can’t spell tetherball without the letters H, E, R, T.” Even worse, I thought, you can rearrange the letters in tetherball to spell…

  • The Pope on Hope

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    Fred Sanders
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    On Nov. 30, Pope Benedict XVI issued the second encyclical of his pontificate. Spe Salvi, “saved by hope,” is a thoughtful and stimulating document by this elderly bishop of Rome. We shouldn’t expect anything less from Joseph Ratzinger, who would have been one of the major theologians of the 20th century even if he hadn’t…

  • Dante’s Ante-Purgatory

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    Greg Peters
    in

    For many Protestant Christians today the doctrine of Purgatory (especially in its medieval articulation) is blatantly wrong. The need for such a place is mainly the result of the medieval concepts of debt, penalty and merit (of Christ and the saints). To a medieval theologian Purgatory was necessary, even desirable. Thus, when Dante Alighieri went…