The Scriptorium Daily

Month: April 2008

  • Christ Knows How to Be God (Austin Farrer)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Jesus is God, but did he know during his earthly ministry that he was God? Was he, as a human, aware of his divinity? I think it is necessary, for biblical and logical reasons, to answer yes to this question, but I freely admit that doing so raises further difficult questions and forces us to…

  • God is Blessed

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    Fred Sanders
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    We should pay more attention to the doctrine of divine blessedness. I have been pondering it lately, noticing it everywhere in older theological writing, and wondering how to give this great doctrine more weight and emphasis. Beatitude, blessedness, is a divine attribute. It is a perfection of God’s being. Blessedness has occupied an ambiguous place…

  • Charles “Freshly” Wesley

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Here’s a cartoon left on my office door by a Torrey student. Charles Wesley turned 300 this year. Who got the mad lyrical flow? I can’t hear you…

  • Every Day with God (Richard Rogers’ Seven Treatises)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Richard Rogers (1550-1618) was a Puritan pastor who noticed that people had lots of questions about how to live the Christian life. They asked very detailed and specific questions, but none of the devotional books available in his time gave correspondingly detailed answers. There were a few Roman Catholic books that got down to specifics,…

  • The Argument from Consciousness

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    Scriptorium Admin
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    Consciousness is among the most mystifying features of the cosmos. Geoffrey Madell opines that “the emergence of consciousness, then is a mystery, and one to which materialism signally fails to provide an answer.”[i] Naturalist Colin McGinn claims that its arrival borders on sheer magic because there seems to be no naturalistic explanation for it: “How…

  • The Lord’s Prayer in the Heidelberg Catechism

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    Fred Sanders
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    Any good catechism includes the Lord’s Prayer, broken up line by line and explained. The Heidelberg Catechism includes such a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in its final ten questions (120-129), and it is excellent. Click through to read the full discussion in question and answer format. From that discussion, I culled the basic interpretation…

  • Worldview Anomalies, Recalcitrant Facts and the Image of God

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    Scriptorium Admin
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    Once upon a time there was a man who thought he was dead. His wife tried everything she could to convince him he was very much alive. But try as she may, he would not change his mind. After several weeks of this, she finally took him to the doctor who assured the man he…

  • On Shakespeare

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    John Mark Reynolds
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    Shakespeare was middlebrow. Though we at the Scriptorium Daily may wish to be able to take credit for Middlebrow, it was the great William Shakespeare who mastered it. In light of Torrey Theater’s upcoming performance of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” the guys at Middlebrow discuss Shakespeare and some of his most influential works. Mayers Auditorium, Biola…

  • Re-Heat Your Chicken; This Dead Chicken

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Reading hundreds of pages of theology every day, I was in a small group of friends in graduate school who helped each other study. We didn’t have much in common except for the looming doctoral exams, and some overlap in our reading assignments. Tired of saying “the group” is getting together, we named ourselves The…

  • In High Esteem

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    Guest Contributor
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    Mark Hopson, 2008. When I graduated from Biola and got my picture taken with Dr. Cook, I found myself at a loss for words on how best to thank him for his ministry in my life. Did I thank him for presiding so effectively over a school that has shaped nearly every aspect of my…

  • Putting Things Together Helps You Think

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    Fred Sanders
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    People who work mainly with intangible things —ideas, interpretations, theories, reviews, explanations— are exposed to a unique kind of danger. Ideas usually don’t kick back at you in a way that forces you to notice. If you make a mistake in interpretation, usually nothing explodes or catches fire. If an academic has a wrong idea…

  • Torrey Students Share Their Memories of Clyde Cook

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    Paul Spears
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    Dr. Clyde Cook was a great man who was much beloved by his students at Biola University. Several students at the Torrey Honors Institute submitted short reflections in honor of this wonderful man of God. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Anna Belle and the entire Cook family. —————————————————————————————————————— A year ago…