Posts by Fred Sanders

A few remarks I made at a ceremony for the five-year anniversary of the artistic renovation of Biola University’s Calvary Chapel on June 22, 2023: This chapel is named Calvary.…

John Flavel’s Method of Grace (2nd ed., 1699) is a wonderful treatise whose scope is clear from its elaborately long title and subtitle: The Method of Grace in Bringing Home…

In 2021 I wrote up a report on how William Burt Pope translated over a dozen works of conservative German biblical scholarship in the 1850s (in his 30s, before publishing…

A trinitarian analogy (“the Trinity is like an egg;” “the Trinity is like a team,” “the Trinity is like the structure of consciousness,” etc.) is a conceptual tool. It’s designed…

David Dickson (1583–1663) wrote a lively commentary on NT epistles, in which he adopted a strongly analytic style. His method was to capture the main idea of a passage in…

Henry Alford (1810-1871) wrote a large-scale commentary on the Greek New Testament, and then condensed that into a commentary on the Authorized and Revised edition for English readers. He’s attentive…

While pastoring in Kelso, Scotland in the 1840s, Horatius Bonar [1808-1889] occasionally published little pamphlets, between three and twelve pages long, just to reach his local audience. Though he initially…

“Soul of Christ, sanctify me.” The anonymous hymn beginning Anima Christi sanctifica me dates to the fourteenth century (see the entry in John Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology (London: John Murray,…

There are a couple of hymn stanzas that used to show up in a lot of the kind of nineteenth-century evangelical devotional literature that I like to read: authors like…

Short version: When we say the Son and Spirit are sent, we have to discipline our ideas about sentness in light of God’s perfection. Long version: The way God makes…

John Norton’s 1654 book The Orthodox Evangelist (pdf, html) is mainly about salvation. Its title page describes it as “a treatise wherein many great evangelical truths… are briefly discussed, cleared,…

In a comprehensive systematic theology, authors usually lay out their exposition of God’s perfections in a sequence, and in a structure, that is by no means absolutely mandatory, but which…

The biblical theology of glory provides an embarrassment of riches. To expound this doctrine, we could proceed simply by concordance-drill, reciting some key passages on divine glory, putting them in…

[Preached Sunday, February 5 at Grace Evangelical Free Church of La Mirada] Learn A Lesson From A Dirty Scoundrel (Fred Sanders).mov from Grace EV Free on Vimeo. Hi friends. So…

In Bavinck’s RD II:151, while talking about divine independence, he gives a wonderful list of Greek terms that develop divine independence by putting the prefix auto- onto a divine attribute:…

The heart of William Burt Pope’s Christology is his effort “to concentrate attention on the unity and the indivisibility of the Saviour’s Incarnate Person.” His Christology, in other words, is…

When you consider the Trinitarian background of the incarnation, you usually summon to mind one of two possible mental frameworks. First is the “one God in three persons” framework, which…

William Burt Pope starts his book on The Person of Christ (2nd ed., 1875) with a few observations about terminology. Specifically, he notes a certain “adjustment of our phraseology” which…