The image of the cross as self-sacrificing love has come under much scrutiny over the past half century. This is because, as James Cone remarked, “The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted.”[1] So, […]
Monday, 25 July, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
Throughout the great ecclesial conflicts that troubled England during its civil wars and the Restoration, John Owen (1616–1683) set for himself the task of specifying the terms upon which the English church could unite groups such as the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, while also excluding such groups as the Catholics and Socinians. On one occasion, […]
Friday, 01 July, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
The Jesuit priest Clifford Howell has claimed that the very essence of Protestantism “is the principle of private judgement.” This means, Howell charges (as do many others), that Protestantism is at its core inherently divisive. Protestants have responded to this charge over and over again, as when Protestant historian Phillip Schaff remarked that the accusation […]
Friday, 01 July, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
From early on, Christianity has been “a religion of the book.” Writing in the latter part of the second century, Irenaeus claimed: We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, […]
Monday, 02 May, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
In the late 1520s, Martin Luther wrote a letter to Henry VIII of England in which he responded to the king’s charges of “detestable heresies.” Henry was particularly outraged by Luther’s notion of “evangelical liberty,” by which he thought Luther was calling for a freedom from all law. To Henry VIII, Luther was the “man […]
Tuesday, 01 March, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
In the very first “In this Issue” of Modern Reformation, Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton lamented that both popular culture and evangelicalism had pushed aside attentive and careful consideration of God, seeking instead entertainment, amusement, and fun. “So in this issue,” Dr. Horton wrote, “we will be raising thinking to the top of the agenda.” Indeed, not […]
Saturday, 01 January, 2022 by Joshua Schendel
Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life gives striking artistic expression to what I presume is a fairly common human experience: the maturation process from childhood through to old age. The series consists of four paintings, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, Old Age, each depicting a person of the represented age in a boat, floating down the waterway […]
Friday, 31 December, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.” So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his Der Antichrist. For most Christians, such a bold assertion will sit ill at ease for them, to understate the matter. This push for power by means of might and combat is not easy to marry with […]
Monday, 01 November, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
In the aftermath of World War I, and during the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats wrote the now nearly ubiquitous line, Things fall apart the center cannot hold. Borrowing imagery from Christian apocalyptic writings, Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” conveys the sense of overwhelming disaster. Things are not just different. They are disintegrating. […]
Wednesday, 01 September, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
Having written about the Reformed orthodox endorsement of metaphysics (though not a simply agreed upon endorsement, it must be said; there was debate about the role and limits of philosophy in theology among the Reformed), it is also important, in order to fill out the historical picture a bit further, to note a common line […]
Wednesday, 28 July, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
The Person of Christ: An IntroductionBy Stephen J. WellumCrossway, 2021180 pages (paperback), $18.99 The two great mysteries of the Christian faith are the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. In his writing on the latter, De Incarnatione Filii Dei, the late sixteenth-century Reformed theologian Jerome Zanchi noted that out of Paul’s “briefest of descriptions” […]
Thursday, 01 July, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
In this issue of Modern Reformation, we think about the theological mind. That’s a funny thing to say but an important thing to do. For Christians over the centuries, questions concerning the renewal of the mind, the maturation of Christian discernment and wisdom, and the charge and state of theological education have proven to be […]
Thursday, 01 July, 2021 by Joshua Schendel