Essay / Theology

Amateurs Needed for the School of Translators

Last year, four professors from Torrey gave brief talks on some of our favorite 20th-century Christian thinkers (Chesterton, Sayers, Tolkien, Lewis). Videos of the talks are here; the whole thing was pretty obviously an excuse to collaborate with Chris Mitchell on a project where he

Essay / Theology

Erasmus Milks Ephesians

Erasmus of Rotterdam taught the Renaissance world how to take a thought and expand it, expound it, extrapolate it into a fountain of new expressions and novel turns of phrase. His “abundant style” bore much fruit for the students who learned it from him. But the

Essay / Theology

9 Papers on Locating Atonement for Los Angeles Theology Conference 2015

Locating Atonement, the 2015 Los Angeles Theology Conference, will be held January 15-16 on the campus of Biola University. Convinced that “theories and models” is a tired way of talking about the theology of the atonement, a trope with some limited pedagogical usefulness but not

Essay / Theology

Well To Start With, Your Last Theologian Was A Idiot

I’ve spent a little time this summer with contractors and plumbers and concrete guys and appliance repairmen, and by “I’ve spent time with” I mean “I’ve been paying.” Like most things that aren’t theology, it has reminded me of theology. There’s a dynamic that occurs

Essay / Theology

Journal of Inductive Biblical Studies

I’m intrigued and encouraged to see the first issue of the Journal of Inductive Biblical Studies, a new journal scheduled to appear twice a year and devoted to promote the hermeneutical approach to the study of the Scriptures generally known as Inductive Biblical Studies. By

Essay / Philosophy

Giles of Viterbo: The Humanist Scholastic

The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, by Giles of Viterbo.   Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) was the most active and creative theologians who tried to bring together two worlds: the Renaissance and its call to return to the sources of classical antiquity, and

Essay / On This Day

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

Essay / On This Day

Vatican II

Today (October 11) is the anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Vatican II meant a lot of things to Roman Catholics on the ground (from changes in practices of fasting, to rumors that everything was about to blow wide open),

Essay / On This Day

Baptism of Aethelbert

Today (June 2) is the day King Aethelbert of Kent was baptized into the Christian faith by Augustine of Canterbury in the year 597. Bede tells us that Aethelbert “was the third English king to become High-King (Bretwalda) of all the provinces south of the

Essay / Culture

Bach as Theologian

I couldn’t let the 326th birthday of the great Kappelmeister go by without some short reflection on my favorite choral piece, the great St. Matthew Passion. As a devout Lutheran, Bach heavily meditated on the passion of Christ, influenced heavily by Martin Luther’s theology of