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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
“And Greater Works Than These You Will Do” I have just finished reading the recent little early history of the church by Fr. David Meconi, SJ., entitled Christ Unfurled: The First 500 years of Jesus’s Life. As the title suggests, the story is told as the fulfillment of Jesus’s words recorded in John 14:12, where […]
Wednesday, 30 June, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
Alexander Solzhenitsyn began his 1970 Nobel lecture with a striking image, saying that we moderns hold art as a “puzzled savage” holds some newfound but obscure object, not knowing whence it came or able to dream of its higher function. We misuse it for wealth, for pleasure, for power. We use it “for all the […]
Saturday, 01 May, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
In the seventeenth century, the Socinians were known as chief heretics. Their denial of the deity of Christ and, thus, the Trinity, of the sovereignty and foreknowledge of God, of original sin, and of hell, among other orthodox teachings, meant that they faced strong opposition from the Reformed, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics alike. A fair […]
Friday, 30 April, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina ApostolorumEdited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, OPThe Catholic University of America Press, 2019338 pages (paperback), $34.95 “This is a book that treats Catholic-Protestant ecumenism as a subject of both fraternal encounter in Christ and rigorous doctrinal argument” (2). So Thomas […]
Monday, 01 March, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
The adventures of the title character of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder begin when she receives a small envelope in the mail one day. Inside are written only three words, but three words that pose the profound question: Who are you? It is a question at once so existential and theoretical, so basic yet ornate, […]
Monday, 01 March, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
There has been no shortage of ink spilled on the relation of Reformed thought—particularly in its discussions of the divine decrees and predestination—and determinism. So, in that respect, the contemporary rendition of the dispute being carried out by Paul Helm, Richard Muller, Antoine Vos, et. al., is not new. And yet, it is recomposed, we […]
Wednesday, 10 February, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
This latest work of Richard Muller, Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace, is yet another title added to the very long list of his historical studies on early Modern Reformed Orthodoxy. As often noted by those who have engaged his research over the years, […]
Wednesday, 06 January, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
Something is afoot today in the Protestant theological world. Thirty-five years ago in his JETS article, “Giving Direction to Theology: The Scholastic Dimension,” Richard Muller noted that much of Modern theology—and, I add, a good deal of evangelical theology—witnessed the rejection of what it considered to be an “outdated” traditional school theology (i.e., Scholasticism) for […]
Friday, 01 January, 2021 by Joshua Schendel
