2014-04-28T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 28, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Comparative literature is a standard discipline in our universities. Comparative arts is less familiar. Daniel Albright has written a treatise on comparative art in his recent Panaesthetics. Debates about the unity and diversity of art have been common in Western thought. Albright thinks that the question is unanswerable since “the arts themselves have no power to aggregate or to separate – they are neither one nor many but will gladly assume the poses of unity or diversity according to the desire... Read more

2014-04-26T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 26, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. He briefly recounts the history of Israel, concluding with the resurrection that the promise of forgiveness and justification. Verse 39 (v. 38 in the Greek text) states that “through Him everyone who believes is justified from all things, from which you could not be justified through the law of Moses.” Several elements are well-known Pauline themes: justification through faith, the... Read more

2014-04-26T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 26, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. He briefly recounts the history of Israel, concluding with the resurrection that the promise of forgiveness and justification. Verse 39 (v. 38 in the Greek text) states that “through Him everyone who believes is justified from all things, from which you could not be justified through the law of Moses.” Several elements are well-known Pauline themes: justification through faith, the... Read more

2014-04-26T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 26, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Brad Gregory argues in his Unintended Reformation that it is a historical prejudice to treat “magisterial” Protestantism, which relied on the support of state power as “normative” Protestantism. Even now, when confessional historiography has given way to new paradigms of Reformation scholarship, most attention is paid to the magisterial Reformers.  There is a reason for this: Magisterial Reformers had long-term success, precisely because they were magisterial. More cynically, magisterial Reformers were successful because state authorities protected and promoted cooperative Reformers, those... Read more

2014-04-26T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 26, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Anthony Milton recounts (Catholic and Reformed) the debates within the seventeenth-century church of England concerning the status of the Catholic church. It was a tricky question. If Anglican divines were too hard on the Catholic church, they provided ammunition for dissenting groups who suggested that the semi-reformed church of England might not be a true church either. It was tricky too because Anglicans were on the whole devoted to an Augustinian sacramental theology, and accepted the Reformers’ view that Catholic... Read more

2014-04-25T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided By Faith is primarily a revisionist history of the rise of toleration in early modern Europe. He challenges the Enlightenment notion that 18th-century intellectuals introduced the idea, showing instead that toleration appeared first as a set of practices in religiously diverse regions of Europe and was first expressed theoretically from within the church. At the outset, though, he tells a tale of intolerance, starting, predictably, with Servetus in Geneva, but arguing, less predictably, that the intolerance of the... Read more

2014-04-25T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Willem van Asselt’s Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism provides a superb overview of the history of Reformed Scholasticism, as well as a survey of the current state of the literature. Early on, he emphasizes the “catholicity” of Reformed Scholasticism: “those who practiced it explicitly aimed to stand within the tradition of the entire church. They made no pretense of originality or of developing the ‘true doctrine.’ As students of the Reformers, they wanted to develop a theology in which there was a... Read more

2014-04-25T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

John P. Burgess of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary spent a year with his family in Russia and recounts the experience of Russian Orthodoxy in his 2013  Encounters with Orthodoxy.  It’s a very personal, sympathetic account. He describes Orthodox practices, and also some theology, in a way that I suspect an Orthodox reader could recognize, and he dispassionately compares Orthodoxy to American Protestantism. He finds many attractions in Orthodoxy, he thinks that Protestants have a lot to learn from Orthodox about ritual,... Read more

2014-04-25T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

John P. Burgess of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary spent a year with his family in Russia and recounts the experience of Russian Orthodoxy in his 2013  Encounters with Orthodoxy.  It’s a very personal, sympathetic account. He describes Orthodox practices, and also some theology, in a way that I suspect an Orthodox reader could recognize, and he dispassionately compares Orthodoxy to American Protestantism. He finds many attractions in Orthodoxy, he thinks that Protestants have a lot to learn from Orthodox about ritual,... Read more

2014-04-25T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: April 25, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

In his introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, James KA Smith sums up Taylor’s argument that the Reformation hastened the “disenchantment” of the world (How (Not) To Be Secular, 38-9). Taylor’s summary of Calvin sounds like a summary of Barth: “The Reformers ‘all see the reigning equilibrium [of transcendence and immanence] as a bad compromise’ – a Pelagian assumption of human powers and thus an inadequate appreciation for the radical grace of God and for God’s action in salvation. If... Read more

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