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When three people work together on a project, each of them does their own part of it. As Gregory of Nyssa describes it, “even if several are engaged in the same form of action, [they] work separately each by himself at the task he has undertaken, having no participation in his individual action with others who are engaged in the same occupation.” There are distances and differences between them: they take turns (distance in time), or work on different parts of the project (distance in space), or come to the project from different angles (again, space). “Each of them is separated from the others within his own environment, according to the special character of his operation.” The reason Nyssa spent time itemizing the nature of cooperation is so he could explain that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit don’t work together in that way:…

There is a powerful and fascinating piece of iconography in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, inside one of the domed cupolas. It’s a ceiling mosaic featuring this image:   It’s a dove on a book on ornate drapery on a pillow on a throne. This throne simply hovers in midair, inside of concentric circles. From behind it come twelve beams of light. All of this is against a golden background made up of thousands of tiny mosaic tiles that flash light or dark gold depending on how the light hits them. The iconographic type is called the prepared throne (greek hetoimasia, italian etimasia), and it is an ancient symbol that brings together a number of meanings. This guide to understanding icons lists three of the main meanings of a prepared throne in Christian iconography: I believe all of these layered meanings go back into the early phases of Christian…

On Memorial Day, I just spent a few minutes scratching together some information on my paternal grandfather, who was the first Fred Sanders in my family line. There are four of us in the series, but all with different middle names. I have a few photos of him in an album somewhere, but of course never met him: even my own dad barely met him, their lifespans overlapping by only about 5 years total. Frederick Manning Sanders enlisted in the Army at age 24 (“At the time of enlistment, Frederick M. Sanders was married, stood 67 inches tall, weighed 133 pounds, and had an education level of grammar school”). He was in the Signal Corps, and while I haven’t found much detail about his service, Signal Corps had major operations in Algiers and then in Caserta, Italy,  operating out of the 1200-room Royal Palace…

Here’s a resource I recommend for teaching theology: George Benedict Winer’s Comparative View of the Doctrines and Confessions of the Various Communities of Christendom.  It’s from the nineteenth century, so it’s public domain, and you can read the original German edition here,  and the English translation here. The whole book is interesting, but I’d especially like to draw your attention to the chart at the end, where Winer instructively condenses his findings. Here is a .pdf of the pages of the book containing Winer’s original chart: GB Winer Tables of Comparative Theology; and here is a version of it I cleaned up for classroom use: GB Winer Comparative Theology Handout. I first encountered Winer’s comparative dogmatics because it was translated and edited by William Burt Pope, a theologian who prepared himself for his own important constructive doctrinal work by choosing a few strategic translation projects (mainly German biblical commentaries by…

Visiting an art museum can be a stifling experience. No matter how friendly the staff or how hospitable the building itself may be, most of us suffer from an almost palpable feeling of intimidation in a museum. Dozens of rooms with hundreds of pictures, all hung exactly at eye level and perfectly lit. You are obviously supposed to LOOK at them. But you can’t look at all of them, or at least you can’t look at them with as much attention as they apparently deserve. Browbeaten by SHEER GREATNESS, you slink by a Rembrandt or apologize to some Italian masterpiece as you dart through the room, and all the eyes in all the portraits do that freaky “follow you through the room” thing. Surely your inability to give each of these masterpieces the attention they deserve reflects poorly on your own character. It’s almost a…

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 before the Lord, pointing dramatically to his eye. This probably means that the Lord is David’s light, by which he perceives. But it may also evoke the beloved verse four, which has a reference to sight: One thing have I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lordand to inquire in his temple. When I study the Psalms, I love to work my way through a…

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. Pierson’s biography of Muller doesn’t just report the dramatic events and miraculous occurrences in Muller’s life —though there were plenty of both, and they do show up in the book. But Pierson has an eye for real life, and for the daily grind that forms the horizon against which such dramatic events occur. So he gathers a host of details, reporting all the little events and influences that formed the life of Muller. Along the way, Pierson interjects this little meditation on how the…

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 writing massive books on the Hebrew cultural background of the New Testament. Scholarship has made appreciable strides since the days of Edersheim, but his heavy tomes are still hard to beat if you’re looking for a readable presentation of all those details that make up the background of the Bible. His best-selling works include The Temple: Its Ministry and Services at the Time of Jesus Christ (1874); Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ (1876); and a 7-volume Bible History (1887). (By the way, he also published some fragmentary thoughts, all jumbled up,…

The Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) once said that a true poem would still be poetical even if you rearranged all the words in it. Or perhaps what he said was that a good poet would still be poetical even if you hacked his body to pieces. Horace seemed to think that word order was important for doggerel (his own verse, or the work of someone named Lucilius), but that a really great poet (he cites a few lines from one Ennius) could be transposed, reversed, and jumbled, and still come out recognizably poetic. Of course, he could have been joking. With Horace, there’s always the chance that he was actually making fun of people who would say that sort of thing. Through all the levels of Horatian irony, it’s hard to be certain. One thing that’s certain is that he…