At the outset of the Anglican baptismal liturgy, an eighteenth-century rector would say “Dearly beloved, for as much as all men are conceived and born in sin. . .I beseech you to call upon God.” Ask God, he urged, to…
Adonis Vidu, Atonement, Law and Justice: The Cross in Historical and Cultural Contexts. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2014. $24.99 Theology does not occur in a vacuum, we are constantly reminded. The Church’s doctrines do not develop in isolation from the…
I am grateful to James Merrick for his thoughtful and measured response to my piece on Lent and for providing me with an opportunity to address the matter further. Reading Merrick’s response, I suspect one of my ecclesiological assumptions…
It’s that time of year again: when we catholic Christians brace ourselves for the blizzard of blog posts by chilly Puritans who hope to warn their flocks against the vices of Ash Wednesday and Lent. I don’t have much interest…
How can we avoid the extremes of monocausal fatalism, on the one hand, and open theism which insists that some events are “pointless” even to God, on the other? As I immersed myself in the Psalms after my cancer diagnosis,…
It’s that time of year again: the ancient tradition of Lent, kick-started by Ash Wednesday. It is also the time of year when us confessional types brace ourselves for the annual onslaught of a more recent tradition: that of evangelical…
No, not Carl’s triumphant return to provide a window into the mind of “Luther” Levy, but rather the celebrity anti-celebrity’s latest offering, considering Luther on the Christian Life (Crossway, arriving later this month). We are promised many good things between…
Returning from labours overseas, especially with limited internet access (and most of that devoted to communication with the family), means returning to Reformation21 with a somewhat fresh perspective. A survey of the material over the past couple of weeks reveals…
In scholastic theological discourse, ‘moral suasion’ and ‘physical influence’ represent two different ways of getting someone to do something. If my goal were, say, getting my four-year-old daughter to the dinner table, I might employ ‘moral suasion’ by promising her…
As I mentioned in the first post under this title (the other posts: no. 2; no. 3; no. 4), this series was a way of breaking up a paper that I gave at a pre-General Assembly conference sponsored by the…
