Conflict Is Never Merely Theological: The Parisian Mendicant Controversy
Ignoring social and political factors is one of the many pitfalls in the discipline of historical theology. These factors can and often do shape theological debates. Take, for example, the relatively unknown so-called Mendicant Controversy of the thirteenth century. The Franciscan and Dominican Orders arose at the beginning of the thirteenth century. These medieval orders […]
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Civilization, Confession, Persuasion – Part I
“Whatever is not from faith is sin,” Paul wrote (Rom. 14:23). While speaking about secondary truths in context, implicit in the Protestant project is the conviction that Paul’s statement applies to primary truths as well. The conscience, due to the necessity of making individual judgments, straddles all classes of truth. And the wisdom of Paul […]
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How Modern Was The Reformation?
To hear some people talk, you would think that the birth of freedom, democracy, and the modern world started with the Protestant Reformation. In fact, the coincidence of faith and modernity has less to do with Martin Luther than with John Calvin, the reformer who had the audacity to question the rule of bishops and […]
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Renewing the Joy of Christian Reading
Why do you read? Do you read to learn, grow, and gain new knowledge? Do you read for pleasure, or does that feel like a luxury you can’t afford? Maybe with the call of ministries and theological studies, you feel like Christian nonfiction is the only option. Yet at the same time, you feel exhausted […]
From the Archives
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Divine Impassibility and Our Suffering God
An important aspect of the Christian gospel that seeks to proclaim the love, mercy, and compassion of God is the affirmation of God’s identification and solidarity with human suffering. A suffering humanity needs a God who knows what it means to suffer. The church has traditionally met this need by emphasizing the passion and death […]
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The Incommunicable Attributes of God
As great Christian minds have scoured the Scriptures they have been able to discern a number of God’s attributes-that is, characteristics affirmed by God as belonging to his nature. These fall into two categories: communicable and incommunicable. The former are those attributes that humanity can share with God as his image bearers (e.g., holiness, relationality); […]
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Poetic Polemics
The name Ralph Erskine (1685- 1752) might not sound that familiar to modern ears but, in fact, this minister’s literary works were once so treasured that as late as 1879 they were still some of the best-selling religious books in London. (1) Most of Erskine’s published material consisted of his sermons, but his most popular […]
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From the Editor
This is a special issue of Modern Reformation. With it, we are wading into new waters that—to many today—may seem quite turbulent, even perilous: the relation of science to the Christian faith. As with all the issues of MR this year, we’re taking a historical approach rather than a theoretical one. In particular, we’re looking […]
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The Importance of Being Written: Scribes at the Westminster Assembly
Specters haunt the history of church committees. Today’s disciplined clerks, as we know them, harken back to yesterday’s unseen scribes. Every reader of ecclesiastical documents and every lover of polity, decency, and good order remains in their debt. For without them, there would be no surviving record of church business. No committee—therefore no associated team […]
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Reading Genesis in the Reformation
Roughly half of American Protestants and a majority of self-identified evangelicals currently reject at least a portion (and in some cases, nearly all) of the modern scientific consensus about the age of the earth and the evolutionary development of life. There are myriad biblical and theological issues involved—not to mention broader social, cultural, and political […]
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