Tag: Biography
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Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014), Theological Outflanker
Wolfhart Pannenberg, retired from a long theology career at Munich, has died at age 85. Pannenberg was a major twentieth-century theologian by any count, with a series of brilliant articles, important books on the topics of revelation, christology, ethics, science, anthropology, and metaphysics, and a hefty 3-volume Systematic Theology to cap off his career. Pannenberg was…
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One of Those Critters
Here is a link to some footage of Bob Warren, who died last week, doing his thing: teaching. This is vintage Bob –although in one sense this footage is not characteristic of him, in that he doesn’t have his Bible open and he’s not digging away at a text. In every other way, though, this…
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Happy Birthday, Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889)
Today (March 7) is the birthday of Alfred Edersheim, the nineteenth-century Bible scholar who really made the grand tour: He was born in Austria, converted from Judaism to evangelical Christianity in Hungary, studied theology in Edinburgh and Berlin, was a missionary to Jews in Romania and a preacher in Scotland. He was ordained in the…
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Claus von Stauffenberg: German Patriot and Hitler’s Would-Be Assassin
Today, November 15, is the one-hundred and fourth birthday of Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a Catholic aristocrat and officer of the German Wehrmacht who led the anti-Nazi resistance within the German war machine. On the 21st of July, 1944, this man, along with two other German army officers, Henning von Treskow and…
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Archduke Otto von Habsburg: A Belated Eulogy
It has been one month since the passing of one of my greatest heroes of the twentieth century. I heard of his passing from my friend Charles Coulombe when I rang him that day, July 4. Both of us agreed that he had been a salient influence in our lives from childhood. He had been…
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Happy Birthday Adolph Saphir
Adolph Saphir (1831-1891), born today (September 26) was a highly-regarded nineteenth-century preacher and Bible expositor. His entire family converted from Judaism to Christianity when the Scottish Free Church sent missionaries to Hungary in 1843. Saphir studied in Berlin, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. He entered the ministry in 1854, and after time as a missionary to…
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How Augustine Died
Today (August 28) is the day Augustine of Hippo died in the year 430. His first biographer, Possidius, tells us how it happened in his Life of Augustine. Augustine died in the city of Hippo, which was under siege by barbarians throughout his final illness (he contracted a fever “in the third month of the…
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Caesarius of Arles
Today (August 27) is the day Ceasarius, Bishop of Arles, died in the year 542. He is most important because of things he didn’t write. Caesarius never wanted to be original, and he wasn’t. He was a conservator and transmitter of the Christian tradition as he received it. He had been a monk at Lerins…
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Karl Bahrdt, Worst Theologian Ever
Today (August 25) is the birthday of Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792), a theologian so bad that it is hard to find anything good to say about him. (He liked tolerance. There, I said one good thing about him.) He was, says one encyclopedia, “a caricature of the vulgar rationalism of the eighteenth century.” A Lutheran…
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Bultmann and Tillich: Same Birthday, Same Problem
Two of the most influential academic theologians of the twentieth century share today, August 20, as their birthday: Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). What an odd coincidence. I wonder if they ever celebrated it together. Both men were prolific, and their theological projects were very different: Tillich was above all a theologian of…
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Happy Birthday, Cyrus Scofield
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was born this day (August 19) in 1843, and died in 1921. A confederate veteran, Scofield had a shameful life (alcoholism, prison for forgery, divorce, etc.) before his conversion and call to pastoral ministry. His fame is linked to his 1909 Reference Bible, the resource that put the first draft of dispensational…
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Trinitarian Gallstones of Clare of Montefalco
What you need, as a Christian, is Jesus in your heart and the Trinity in your guts. At least that’s what Clare of Montefalco had. Today (August 18) was the day that Clare of Montefalco (1268-1308) died. Clare entered the Augustinian convent at age nine. By the end of her life she was abbess of…