A scene from The Canterbury Psalter (12th century)
Weakly
Theology Weakly, No. 4
Scales are excellent visual aids, especially the kind of two-pan, equal-arm balances that let you see two quantities played off against each other. They help you visualize things that can start to seem abstract: equality, comparison, proportionality, ratios, trade-offs, and so on. Earlier this year I browsed through antique stores in California and Missouri, looking for a cheap price on some sturdy, portable scales to show students. I learned a couple of things. First, there’s technically a difference between scales (which measure weight) and balances (which measure mass). This difference is enforced by science teachers and by Big Scale (I think it’s a plot to sell more scales), but all the rest of us tend to use the word scale, loosely, for everything. Second, I discovered that actual two-pan balance scales are kind of rare. There are gobs of non-functional, decorative ones to sit…
Theology Weakly No. 3
Puritans (and other Hot Prots of the English variety) wrote some amazing works on the book of Ephesians. In fact, you could even narrow the focus down to just authors from Cambridge, and I think you’d be able to identify a distinct tradition of Protestant theologizing on Ephesians. And there’s more than just a coincidence of book and location here. I suspect that a distinct stream of theologizing about the Christian life came into being in Cambridge with an identifiable cluster of ideas. You might call these ideas particularly activist, or actualistic, or experiential. I’m not the first person to see a particular profile of Protestant piety in Cambridge; Paul Schaeffer drew the argument together nicely in 2011’s The Spiritual Brotherhood: Cambridge Puritans and the Nature of Christian Piety. Some of the earmarks of that movement were “practical divinity,” a soteriology of union with…
Theology Weakly No. 2
Top of Mind at As Thursday’s Over: That’s what I write and post at Theology Weakly on Fridays. I originally described my plan as jotting down whatever’s “top of mind at the end of the week,” but then I noticed that the initial letters of that phrase spell out TOMATEOTW. That’s so close to TOMATO that I figured hey, why not. Let’s live the dream and squeeze the acronym TOMATO out of it. Especially since I figured out how to make WordPress do that crazy drop-cap thing to start select paragraphs with giant initial letters. So welcome to tomato. Maybe I’ll acronym a different fruit next week. Out of all the things I worked on this week, my short book on eternal generation for Crossway is the most urgent. I’m way behind deadline with it. And I’m really happy with the big chunk I’ve…
Theology Weakly No. 1
Banner modified from Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, a twice-weekly twopenny sheet published in London from 1750 to 1752). Last week I finished writing an essay (7k words) on the resurrection of Jesus. It’ll appear eventually in a multi-author book on reading the life of Jesus theologically. I got very interested in John 10:17-18, “I lay down my life in order that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again.” There is so much going on there! I started into my exposition of it this way: In this dominical utterance, a distance seems to stretch open within the single speaker. Suddenly he-who-will-take-up (“I”) gazes across that vast inner space toward that-which-will-be-taken-up (“my life”). Yet there…
Fred Sanders is a theologian who tried to specialize in the doctrine of the Trinity, but found that everything in Christian life and thought is connected to the triune God.
