2017-02-07T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 7, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

In a 1991 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, John H. Wright asks what role 1 Chronicles 23–27 play in the Chronicler’s account. The chapters look like a digression. David delivers an exhortation to Solomon (1 Chronicles 23) and makes him king (23:1), but that is followed by five-chapter digression as the Chronicler describes, in excruciating detail, the numbers and duty-assignments of Levites and priests. In chapter 28–29, we seem to be back where we started, with David addressin... Read more

2017-02-07T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 7, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Irene Dingel’s contribution to Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550-1675 examines the role of controversy in the formation of Lutheran theology and practice. She examines several early intra-Lutheran controversies, among them the contest between the Gnesio-Lutherans led by Matthias Flacius and the “Philippists” led by Melanchthon. The former accused the latter of compromise and abandonment of the Reformation gospel. Overtly doctrinal and practical questions came into dispute, but sub-doctrinal questions of theological method and convictions about ritual were equally important. The Gnesio-Lutherans... Read more

2017-02-06T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 6, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

During the early decades of the Reformation, there were efforts on all sides to reconcile Reformers and Catholics. Diarmaid MacCulloch (Europe’s House Divided) describes the ecumenical efforts of the Archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied. Von Wied was not a promising candidate to be a reform leader: He was no great scholar, and his acquisition of the Archbishopric while still only a sub-deacon in 1515 did not suggest that he would break the mould of aristocratic German church leadership any... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Douglas Murray reports at The Spectator on the ongoing and largely ignored persecution of Christian villages in Nigeria: “These tribal-led villages, each with their own ‘paramount ruler,’ were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians — from the bishop down — sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. The international community pretends that this situation is a tit-for-tat problem, rather than a one-sided slaughter. Meanwhile, in Nigeria,... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Zechariah thought utopia is a place where there are games in the streets: “the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets” (Zechariah 8:5). Anthony Esolen agrees (Out of the Ashes, 164-5), because the fact that children play in the streets implies a great deal about the conditions of society. Riffing on Chesterton, he writes: “Because children should be able to play freely outdoors and for hours on end, there should be neighborhoods... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Brad Gregory (Unintended Reformation, 130-2) argues that, despite their obvious differences, modern states that allow free religious expression, confessional states, and totalitarian states that suppress religion have a common root. Both assume that the state determines the limits of allowable religion on its own, an assumption that Gregory traces back to late medieval developments, encouraged by the Reformation: “Because they are also so obviously different—religion as freely permitted, overtly suppressed, or officially mandated, respectively—their common roots in the distant past... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Diarmaid MacCulloch (Reformation: Europe’s House Divided) points to the “bizarre fortunes” of the Bremen Cathedral to illustrate the “stand-off and ill-will between the two Protestantisms,” Lutheran and Reformed: With its crucial position in the north-west of the German lands, [Bremen] had once been the very heart of early medieval Christianity’s first mission to the peoples of north Germany and Scandinavia. Bremen went over in the 1530s to the Lutheran cause against the opposition of its Catholic archbishop, but by 1561... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Diarmaid MacCulloch (Reformation: Europe’s House Divided) calls attention to the effect of Psalm-singing, spurred on by Beza’s publication of a French Psalter in 1562–3: The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

Owen Chadwick devotes a chapter of The Reformation to “the decline of ecclesiastical power.” He reviews the effects of the Reformation on excommunication, the benefit of clergy, church property and the power of the local parish church. Sanctuary was one of the medieval institutions ended by the Reformation. Sanctuary rights were already under suspicion in the medieval period: “In the later Middle Ages [sanctuary] became a way of evading justice. In some notorious cases, like the church of St Martin-le-Grand... Read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 12:00 am   By

“The most influential work of Italian spirituality in these years, the Beneficio di Cristo (published 1543, and apparently selling in tens of thousands before translation into other European languages), illustrates this continuing shapelessness—it was itself a somewhat shapeless work. It was written by a Cassinese Benedictine monk Don Benedetto da Mantova, through whom it gained a characteristically Cassinese colouring of the great Fathers of the fourth- and fifth-century Greek Church like John Chrysostom (chapter 2, p. 91). It was then... Read more

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