Jonathan Edwards and the Sanctified Emotions

Last updated on: September 28, 2015 at 10:12 am By Thomas Kidd

A recent e-mail conversation with Lauren Winner raised an important question – in the view of Jonathan Edwards and similar eighteenth-century evangelicals, do the emotions become more, or less, central to the Christian life as the believer proceeds in sanctification? After the resurrection, and during the millennial reign of Christ, will believers’ emotions be “engaged and firing”? Contemporary evangelicals often are suspicious of emotions or the “affections.” How many times have I heard people say something like “don’t base your faith... Read more

Pope Francis and Our America

Last updated on: September 27, 2015 at 7:53 pm By Agnes Howard

At the end of the first visit of Pope Francis to the United States, we should remember that his Holiness came to us by way of Cuba. And coming by way of Cuba, his travels might remind us of the shared historical experience of the United States and those Spanish-speaking lands south of the border, lest our attention to those borders only be fixed on making them more rigid. Centuries before, in 1674-5, another bishop, Gabriel Diaz Vara Calderon, Bishop... Read more

Zechariah’s Angels

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 11:00 am By Philip Jenkins

The Old Testament book of Zechariah challenges a lot of conventional assumptions about the development of Second Temple Judaism, and its chronology. Conventionally, historians of Jewish thought trace a series of very significant trends that emerged from the fifth century BC onwards, and which reached fruition only in the second century BC. Most strikingly, these included a steadily expanding view of the heavenly hierarchy and the role of angels; a growing number of celestial intermediary figures between God and humanity;... Read more

The Historical Adam

Last updated on: September 23, 2015 at 11:43 pm By johnturner

Books & Culture recently hosted a symposium on the “historical [or not] Adam,” organized by Karl Giberson and John Wilson. Eight participants posted brief essays on the subject, followed by a round of responses. Here are some highlights from each: Peter Enns, Eastern University: “the modern study of the ancient world of the Bible has made a ‘historical Adam’ intellectually implausible. Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have... Read more

Outsourcing Death and Dying in America

Last updated on: September 23, 2015 at 12:04 am By Miles Mullin

This marks my last regularly-scheduled post for the Anxious Bench as the demands of my new position at Hannibal-LaGrange University dictate a reprieve from writing deadlines. It seems fitting that a fitting bookend would be my first official Anxious Bench post as a regular contributor. So from the archive, here is “Outsourcing Death and Dying in America.” It was originally posted on May 8, 2013. Once an intimate family affair, death and dying are now outsourced in America. Set in... Read more

Should We Elect a Muslim President?

Last updated on: September 22, 2015 at 10:08 am By Thomas Kidd

Ben Carson stirred up the latest Republican primary tempest this weekend when he volunteered the opinion that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” What should we make of this statement? First, it speaks to a pervasive religious ignorance in our political culture, of which Carson is hardly the only example. If we assume that the world’s billion or so Muslims are all the same – all of them jihadists and Sharia-imposers – then... Read more

Zechariah and Revelation

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 9:25 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing about the Old Testament book of Zechariah and where it stands in relation to the apocalyptic tradition, no less than to prophecy. Zechariah – and especially the final chapters, Deutero-Zechariah – were a huge influence on apocalyptic, and that is nowhere more clear than in the New Testament Book of Revelation. The closer we look at Zechariah, the clearer we see its role in early Christian thought. I say immediately that my comments here are anything... Read more

Zechariah’s Apocalypse

Last updated on: July 3, 2015 at 1:15 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have posted a few times on the Old Testament Book of Zechariah, and especially its final chapters, which are known as Second or Deutero-Zechariah. The text is a huge influence on the gospels, and arguably on Jesus’s own circle. But Zechariah as a whole also stands in a very unusual and significant relationship to other Biblical books, and to the context in which they were written. It is almost a gateway between the Hebrew Bible and the very different... Read more

Liberty and Civility

Last updated on: September 17, 2015 at 12:13 am By johnturner

Earlier this week, Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke to 12,000 students at Virginia’s Liberty University. Sanders’s visit provided some of the more substantive political theater in the 2016 campaign thus far. The self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” proved himself a bit more facile with the Bible than the Donald, and he received a polite if somewhat hesitant response from his evangelical audience. It’s hard not to appreciate politicians who go into “enemy territory.” Rand Paul went to Berkeley... Read more

Nightmare at Wheaton: Wes Craven Encounters the Fundamentalist Harvard

Last updated on: September 16, 2015 at 10:35 am By David Swartz

Imagine Wes Craven, the Hollywood provocateur who died last week, as a student at Wheaton College in the 1960s. This was a Wheaton that was easily as pietistic and fundamentalist as it was evangelical. President Raymond Edman, a gentle devotional writer, died while delivering a chapel sermon entitled “In the Presence of the King.” His successor, Hudson Armerding, a naval commander in World War II, ran the college like it was the military. Seeing ROTC as an incubator for submission... Read more