Grace: How Strange the Sound

As recounted in the recent film, the author of “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, not only knew about grace, but every line of the famous hymn was part of his experience. Born in 1725 to a Protestant mother and a mariner father who had been educated by Spanish Jesuits, John Newton was taught by his mother […]

"The Beatles are more popular than Jesus." Such was John Lennon's evaluation of the phenomenon of Beatlemania in the mid-1960s. What is even more interesting than Lennon's observation, however, is the response that Americans gave to such a bold claim: We rose up, and with our righteous indignation reaching peak levels, we piled our Beatles' […]

Frank was pathetic, with all the uncomfortable connotations of that overused word. He was twice our age, with ten times our worldly experience, legally blind, formerly a member of an L.A. street gang, without any formal education, and crying as if no one else was in the room. The teacher had just explained how to […]

It's hard to imagine anyone complaining about grace. We like grace: it's a wonderful thing to be saved by grace, and we can't get enough of it-at least in our songs. I wonder, however, just how many of our parishioners appreciate the language of John Newton's hymn, "Amazing Grace." Do we really have pews full […]

In the earliest editions of his Loci Communes Theologici ("Common Topics of Theology"), Luther's friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon did not address in great detail the doctrine of predestination. In the Loci of 1521, for instance, he discussed it only briefly in the section dealing with the freedom of the human will. Following the teaching […]

Since the seventeenth century, Calvinism has been identified with its five-point reply to the Arminian party at the Synod of Dort. Calvinists often complain that this summary of their theology, though accurate in expressing the Calvinists' disagreement with their Arminian opponents, presents a truncated view of what Calvinism really is. Where in the five points […]