The Christian…finds in the Bible the very Word of God. Let it not be said that dependence upon a book is a dead or an artificial thing. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was founded upon the authority of the Bible, yet it set the world aflame. Dependence upon a word of man would be […]
Monday, 01 November, 2010 by John R. Muether
Long before Jack Kerouac, there was John Calvin. According to the Genevan Reformer, the Christian life was a sojourn, and we are always on the road. The metaphor of pilgrimage serves as a distinguishing feature of this fine new biography by Herman Selderhuis (church historian at the Theologische Universiteit Apeldoorn in the Netherlands). Calvin was […]
Friday, 30 October, 2009 by John R. Muether
Evangelical presses continue to spill ink over postmodernism. Millard J. Erickson, Professor of Theology at Baylor University and Western Seminary in Portland, provides in this survey an otherwise undistinguished addition to that collection, were it not for one striking feature about it. Erickson's focus is on the movement that is calling itself "post-conservative" evangelicalism. The […]
Tuesday, 28 August, 2007 by John R. Muether
As “people of the Book,” American evangelicals have also been people of books. In order to take the Word of God seriously, they have taken seriously the words of others, recognizing the vital importance of stimulating reading in the development of godly minds. In 1956, Christianity Today was founded on the premise that conservative Protestantism […]
Tuesday, 07 August, 2007 by John R. Muether
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. There is no salvation outside the Church. In the good old days of American religious warfare these were perhaps fighting words for many Protestants, as they smacked of the mysterious and repressive haughtiness of Catholic sacerdotalism. Today, claims of the Church's exclusivity seem quaint and inconceivable, not least among Roman Catholics […]
Thursday, 02 August, 2007 by John R. Muether
An enduring metaphor in the most popular of Christian devotional literature, from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to Charles Shelton's In His Steps, is that of pilgrimage. This is to be expected, because Scripture itself enjoins us to imagine the life of faith as a journey: we are traveling toward a destination we have not reached. […]
Tuesday, 12 June, 2007 by John R. Muether
If James Hunter's 1987 book, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, was not a bomb on the happy playground of American evangelicals, it was at least a powerful grenade. In that book, as well as his 1983 work, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity, Hunter set out to demonstrate that the theological and moral […]
Wednesday, 30 May, 2007 by John R. Muether
What would it take to produce a 3,000-entry encyclopedia of a movement as diverse and ephemeral as American evangelicalism? A lot of ambition and more than a little audacity. In other words, it would take Randall Balmer. Balmer is a religious historian at Barnard College who has authored several books on American evangelicalism, such as […]
Wednesday, 30 May, 2007 by John R. Muether