John Bunyan (1628-1688) believed in the Trinity, and referred to the doctrine throughout his writings. But he devoted only one extended meditation to it, a piece entitled “Of the TRINITY and a CHRISTIAN,” whose title suggests an interest in something practical and perhaps edifying. The descriptive sub-title specifies that it is about “How a young or shaken Christian...
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Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was never persuaded that the doctrine of the Trinity had anything to do with the gospel. It is common enough to blame Schleiermacher for his role in marginalizing the doctrine of the Trinity: He famously placed the doctrine at the very end of his work The Christian Faith, making it something of an appendix to the main work. One could...
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I keep hearing that "Protestants" are by definition people who "protest," that is, people defined by their disagreement with something, their dissent, their rejection of something. It is, in other words, considered a term of negation.
Now, I don't make much of this, but it seems to me like a bit of bogus etymology. "Protest" might be the nearest cognate in modern english, ...
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A theological performance well worth the price of admission is watching the mature Karl Barth (1886-1968), trying to sort out the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, or the relative continuity and discontinuity between the covenants. In Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, in par. 69, the sub-section on Jesus as "the light of life," Barth is describing the prop...
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Adolphe Monod (1802 - 1856), delivered a sermon on the Trinity from his sickbed as he came within the month of his death. His text was Romans 8:12-17, and two most arresting paragraphs for me are these:
Holy Scripture is wise, even in its silence. You would look in vain therein for the word Trinity, to express the doctrine concerning which I have it on my heart, if G...
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Here is something which I suspect I have said before. But when John Henry Newman (1801-1890) says something, it always sounds a lot better than when anybody else says it. I found it on the last page of Andrew Louth's odd little book Discerning the Mystery (1983), and Louth's footnote places it in Newman's Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached Before...
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Baptist theologian John Gill (1697 - 1771), in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity, has an especially clear presentation of human salvation as grounded in the eternal God. This is a topic I have been trying to learn more about by studying Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679), but right now I find that Goodwin's writing gives off too much light and glory for me to comprehend all of what I ...
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Claude Beaufort Moss (whose birth and death dates I cannot find) was a 20th-century Anglican theologian whose textbook, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, has been frequently reprinted. The good blbliophiles over at Project Canterbury have made it available online for your easy perusal.
I'm nominating this book for Worst Opening Sentences Of A S...
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Gerald Bray once noted the sad situation that although evangelicals are doctrinally correct on the Trinity, the doctrine “has not played a very central part in their thinking.” Going way back to the period following the Reformation, Bray points out that although refuting Unitarianism was easy enough, evangelical arguments always “smacked more of defensiveness than th...
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Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: "Yahweh is my light," but then extended differently: "and my salvation... my strength."
The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King David kneeling befo...
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In 1936, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles started the Torrey Memorial Association under the leadership of president Paul Rood. Joining this society was a way of pledging support for an institute which intended to carry on the legacy of R. A. Torrey, the founding dean. Medallions were minted ...
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George Muller (1805-1898) was a 19th-century pastor famous for trusting God to meet his daily needs, even when his daily needs grew to include caring for thousand of orphans. His life story has been told many times, but the classic version, approved by his family, was written by A. T. Pierson (1837-1911), himself an important figure and the subject of a recent biography.
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For penetrating insight into the character of Old Testament revelation, there are few scholars of the caliber of Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889). Edersheim was a Viennese-born Jew who converted to Christianity under the ministry of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and he turned that unique formative experience into the basis for a scholarly career: He is most famous for wr...
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