Lent me your ears
In 1528 Catholic and Protestant theologians met in the city of Berne to debate a series of topics associated with the burgeoning Reform movement in Switzerland. “The Ten Theses of Berne” focused on issues such as the nature of the…
Category Reformation21
ISIS and the Imprecatory Psalms
The recent execution of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya by the murderous Islamic group ISIS has prompted appropriate and helpful Christian reflections (see here and here). But one question I have yet to see asked is, “Is it time now…
Disappearing into the sunset of another brave new world
The credits roll. The hero and/or heroine (fling in a plural or two as appropriate) mount their horses, or link their arms, or climb aboard, or do something else redolent of completion, and disappear into the sunset. Some measure of…
Christ’s Entrance into Heaven
Have you ever wondered what it must have been like when Christ entered heaven after having ascended? This was a unique moment in redemptive history, and one that we should probably meditate upon a lot more than we do. At…
George Whitefield, Principled Calvinist 1: Froward From My Mother’s Womb by Thomas Kidd
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…
Atonement, Law and Justice
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…
Catholicity Reduced to Ashes: A Surrejoinder to James Merrick
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…
Catholicism or Consumerism? A Question to Carl Trueman about Ash Wednesday and Lent
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…
Divine Providence: Occupying The Mysterious Middle [Part 3]
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,…
Ash Wednesday: Picking and Choosing our Piety
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…