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When C.S. Lewis took the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Cambridge, he knew it would be hard work to convince his new university, with its greater proportion of scientists than at his alma mater Oxford, to consider his extremely old-fashioned subject matter. For Lewis, ‘old-fashioned’ meant mainly the fully integrated, pre-scientific view of the cosmos: classical planets circling the central earth in nested crystalline spheres, and the whole thing moved by one great ontological desire for God. He gave a two-part lecture called “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” not published at the time but later gathered with some other leftovers in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Walter Hooper rightly says these lectures “amount almost to a précis of The Discarded Image,” (viii) but written specifically with scientists in mind. In these lectures, Lewis is not so much introducing potential…

On Tues 7 Feb at 6pm, the choirs of King’s and St John’s Colleges will be singing choral evensong in St John’s College Chapel. On this summer trip, we normally try to attend evensong in King’s College chapel as an opportunity to be in that especially special space with its famous fan-vaulted ceiling. (Students who want to do this on their own can attend worship at King’s on Fri, Sat or Sun.) But of course St. John’s chapel is also wonderful, and a double choir is especially powerful. Here is the order of the musical portions of the service, which I’ve fitted with links for students who want to study up in advance for what they’ll be hearing during the service (of course you can also refer back to these links after the fact, in case you prefer to keep exploring at leisure what…

Any chance I get, I introduce students to a classic form of Bible study that I call immersive rereading. It’s a simple method that has been around for ages, and has gone by many different names.1 Immersive rereading may not be the most elegant name, but it captures the goal (become immersed in the message of book of the Bible) and the technique (read it over and over). Choose a short book of the Bible and an extended span of days. For me this usually means a 4-6 chapter epistle and three weeks, because usually I get to assign this kind of work in an intensive summer course. A week would be far too short to get the benefits; a semester too long for most people to maintain their focus. This summer I’ve got about 30 students in Cambridge immersively rereading Colossians (4 chapters,…

On the seventh day, God rested from all his works (Gen 2:2). The OT itself, and then the NT, especially Hebrews, shows some interest in the meaning of divine rest. Augustine brushes up against this notion of divine rest in several places (the very end of Confessions, the appropriate place in City of God, and the various Genesis treatises he wrote or started). While Augustine sees in this repose something of God’s eternity, he also tends to involve humans in the deeper sense of God’s resting: God works in us now but will repose in us at last, etc. [I thought this would be easy to look up, but it turns out I’ll need to get at least a half dozen books open in order to be properly attentive to a theme Augustine revisited often.] Thomas Aquinas asks (ST I Q73a2) whether it is…

The Nicene Creed says the Son is “begotten, not made.” This contrast is one of the ways the creed clarifies its teaching about what begetting, or generation, is; by contrast with what it is not. It’s a statement of Christology, obviously. But the same contrast also helps us in the other direction, as a statement about cosmology or the doctrine of creation. What’s creation? Not begetting, not generation, not the internal coming-forth of a necessary relation in the singular divine essence. In other words, when you learn to call the Son “begotten, not made,” you learn to call creation made by contrast to begotten. You’re on your way to affirming creation from nothing more clearly, even though all you were trying to do was be clear about Christology. I like to think I could make that argument historically, showing that the doctrine of creatio…

Here’s the video and written text of a sermon I preached at my home church on April 22, 2024. Because the written text was originally a script for oral delivery, it has more hard returns than necessary, and even / a few slashes / that I dropped in to make sure I didn’t run words or phrases together in way that might / confuse the ear of the listener. I. The Story After the Stories We’re focusing this morning on a very special story from the last chapter of the Gospel of John.Its nickname is “The Miraculous Catch/ of Fish,” or sometimes, “The Second Miraculous Catch/ of Fish,” because there was a previous one (Luke 5), but this story takes place after Christ has risen from the dead. And that changes everything. I believe it must be the final recorded miracle of Jesus. It’s…

When I guest preach in a brand new place, it’s likely to be on Ephesians 1:3-14. I’ve lived in that passage long enough that I know what I’m doing in there, I’ve studied every word, and I have a good sense of where everything is. I can reach into it and bring out the parts that I think will speak to this congregation. I feely admit that my Ephesians 1 sermon is what some traditions call a “sugar stick” sermon. But I also never tire of it, and there’s always something new in it for me. I recently spoke at Sovereign Hope in Missoula (Hi Fongs! Hi Tyler!), and as I unfolded the riches of Ephesians 1 this time and explored the meaning of “every spiritual blessing,” I found something new. I’m not sure what to call it, but it has something to do…

The Student Ministry at my church (middle school and high school) has been studying John 13-17 for a few months. The Pastor of Student Ministry invited me to join their Wednesday night meeting to speak about Christian unity, with a special focus on how to think about all the different denominations that exist. I spoke for about 40 minutes before the whole group broke up into small groups for discussion. While I didn’t write up anything official, I did prepare some talking points and wanted to post them here. (Don’t expect much more than talking points, dear reader.) Jesus prayed in John 17:20-23, asking the Father that those who believe in him would be unified: “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you.” When we hear about being One just like the Father and Son…

There’s a little story in Brother Andrew’s classic book God’s Smuggler that always comes to mind when I think about what Christians have in common. The gist of it is that two believers with no shared language find a way to communicate anyway via their shared love of the Bible. I first heard the story as a little kid, when my dad read it to me from the little Penguin paperback edition of the bestseller (1967, co-authored with John and Elizabeth Sherrill). And I’m probably guilty of re-telling it quickly, with insufficient detail, to make a point about Christian unity. So here’s the detail, from ch. 15 of the original edition (I don’t have, and haven’t consulted, the Chosen/Baker updated edition, which is the official best way to get the whole book). Anyway, for my own future reference, here’s the story. Brother Andrew (real…

Gregory of Nyssa takes up the Nicene faith and sings it in the key of life: We believe in the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:3) who is the fountain of life (cf. Ps 36:9), and in the only-begotten Son of the Father (Jn 3:14, 18) who is the Author of life, as the Apostle says (Acts 3:15), and in the Holy Spirit of God, concerning whom the Lord said, it is the Spirit who gives life (Jn 6:40).1 You see what he is doing: Taking the theme of life, and knowing that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Nyssa looks through Scripture to find passages where each person of the Trinity is linked to life. What he finds is the Father as fountain, Son as source, and Spirit as giver. This corresponds neatly with both Matthew 28:19 (the sequence…

When John Davenant (1572-1641) hits the word “grace” in the opening of Colossians, he has much to say. His Colossians commentary is admirably copious (about 900 pages). But he’s never just filling up pages or chasing word count. Davenant on Colossians has a constant eye for theological interpretation. By way of greeting, Paul says “grace to you.” Earlier Davenant had acknowledged the word’s use (alongside “truth”) as a salutation, Here he digs in and informs us that the term grace denotes three things : First, the gratuitous act of the Divine will accepting man in Christ, and mercifully pardoning his sins. This is the primary meaning of this word, which the Apostle every where enforces. By grace are ye saved (Eph 2:5); Being justified freely by his grace (Rom 3:24). This gratuitous love of God is the first gift, says Altissiodorensis [William of Auxerre],…

Ralph Erskine (1685-1752) wrote voluminously but not systematically, so tracing out a line of thought in his work can be a challenge. I’m jotting down some notes here on a line of thought I’d like to pursue sometime. Erskine’s got a theology of the presence of the Son which I think presupposes a notion of trinitarian mission; it presupposes it but doesn’t quite make it explicit. In the places where I expect him to say “the Son from the Father,” he tends to say “God in Christ.” He does have a high, traditional trinitarian theology, but when he speaks (as he often does, quite resourcefully and deliberately) of direct, experiential contact with God in Christ, he tends not to connect the trinitarian dots. Of course “God in Christ” means the Father sent the Son, and Erskine knows that. But his theology offers a chance…

One of the last writings Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) completed was his Five Books on Consideration. The whole work is fascinating and worth reading: it’s essentially advice to one of his former students who had become bishop of Rome (Pope Eugene III), explaining how to manage such great obligations without losing his soul. The early books feature meditations on virtue, practical advice on schedule management and delegation, an apology for the results of the second crusade, and plenty of pointed directions for how to reform the church’s own government –these catalogs of abuses and corruptions help explain why On Consideration became a favorite text among reformers like Wyclif and Erasmus, and especially among capital-R Reformers like Calvin. But the real treasure is Book V, chapters 6-14. Here in the final 25 pages or so, Bernard turns the reader’s attention to the things above, and…

People who tend to think of the three persons of the Trinity as three distinct individuals, each with their own individual center of consciousness (maybe a differentiated self-awareness knotted together with a matching other-awareness), faculty of willing, and so on, are what we loosely call “social trinitarians.” I put this in scare quotes because it’s a notoriously imprecise label that has probably served more to confuse issues than it has succeeded to pick out any particular view. It’s one of those conventional labels that you have to use and then immediately define specifically; so it loses the advantages that labels are supposed to have: quick, clear communication. But when it functions adequately, the “social” in “social trinitarian” is supposed to evoke the old social analogy for the Trinity: the persons of the Trinity are like three people in a close relationship. Perhaps the label…

If you’re already familiar with the other Gospels, Mark can be startling. How in the world can he leave out so much? How can he start the story of Jesus without explaining either the virginal conception or the genealogy of Jesus? How can he bring in John the Baptist with no historical backstory? How can he just start right in with the heavens being torn open and Jesus hearing the voice of the Father saying, “You are my beloved son”? Even if you affirm Mark’s chronological priority, and on that basis believe that the proper form of these questions ought to be flipped around (“Why do Matthew and Luke add so much?”), Mark’s narrative parsimony is remarkable. His “suddenly this happened!” storytelling strategy leaves you wondering how we got here, even when we just got here. Consider the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan….