Category: History/Church History
The Latin and Reformed Imagination
By Felipe Vogel “The Reformation … was more a song or a symphony than a system, more lyric than lecture,” claims Peter Matheson in The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Yet lectures and systems are likely what comes to mind...
Returning to the Sources: The Scholarship of Richard Muller
By Michael Lynch Today, if you walk into a random art gallery in the Grand Rapids, Mich. area, you might come across an 18th century Dutch landscape oil painting with a windmill or a church in its background. Perhaps, the...
Lessons from Valladolid: On Being Decent in an Indecent Age
By Catherine Addington When a Christian is caught between a political economy hostile to human flourishing and a Church all too often comfortable with the status quo, it is demoralizing to have recourse to an ugly, embattled public square. Who...
The Evangelical Center After Billy Graham
It’s a fairly banal observation, at this point, to note that the success of Billy Graham and other mid-century evangelicals, like Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Ockenga, came from their ability to formulate a centrist vision of American Protestantism....
How to Celebrate the Reformation
Today marks the 500th anniversary of the day that Martin Luther (might have) nailed his famous 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. While the historicity of that famous event is in dispute, what is not in question is...
Patience and Hermeneutics: On Brian Zahnd, Marcion, and Origen
I’m pleased to publish this guest essay from Dr. Mark Randall James. Brian Zahnd’s new book, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, has invited comparison with one of the greatest of early heretics, Marcion. In a long and...
The Church Has Always Known Theological Controversy
“Not again.” That was my first thought when Eugene Peterson’s comments on gay marriage came out. Regardless of the retraction, I knew the next few days would be ugly online. Various think-pieces (good and bad) would come, as would the...
Martin Bucer’s Strenuous Life
Reading Sen. Ben Sasse’s recent book The Vanishing American Adult reminded me of a chapter I read about the home life of Martin Bucer, a 16th century pastor and leader in the Protestant Reformation. Though his lifestyle was not that aberrant amongst the...
The Religious Right Is Not a Subsidiary of the Alt-Right
In a recent essay for The New Republic, religion reporter Sarah Posner contends that the Religious Right has “effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda.” By effectively wedding themselves to Trump’s narrative about ‘American...
Reviewing Radicalism: When Reform Becomes Revolution
In 2017, many Protestants will observe the 500th anniversary of their revolution—or at least of its most celebrated image: the promulgation of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Though inevitably drowned out by triumphalism, some such observances will be understandably ambivalent about the...