17 Aug 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
We've now referred to "twofold justice" a few times, viz. the justice and charity inherent in us by grace, and the justice of Christ's perfect merit imputed to us through union with Christ by faith. But, having dealt with the potential ambiguity of the term "justice," the cardinal comes now to the important...
Read more → 15 Aug 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Herewith the next installment. (Read that first and then circle back up here.) A couple of important points: Contarini denies that we are justified because of inherent faith, as though "faith" in the proposition were treated as a good work that is equivalent to "righteousness." Next, he denies that...
Read more → 10 Aug 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson
Cleaning out some paperwork in my office reminded me that, after three years, I should get back to this series and finish it at some point. Lo these many months ago I started a new translation of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini's treatise De iustificatione, "On Justification." I was not quite halfway through...
Read more → 09 Aug 2018
Posted by Brian Mattson 
Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written an essay on the Pauline terms “spirit,” (πνευμα) “soul,” (ψυχη), and “flesh” (σαρξ), maintaining that modern readers are greatly (or perhaps completely) hindered in their understanding of them. He lays blame on a kind...
Read more → 27 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
"Literalism" frequently gets a bad rap nowadays when it comes to the Bible. The word "literal" is fraught with ambiguities, especially in its modern usages, which I have no intention of getting into here. But the practice of reading the Bible ad litteram--"according to the natural sense of the words,"...
Read more → 25 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
"Natura abhorret a vacuo" Nature abhors a vacuum, and so every people constituted as a political body is going to have a schedule of sacred observances, of holy days--days marked out as special in some way, whether because of their perceived relation to a polity's foundation or to its preservation....
Read more → 16 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
It is well known that C.S. Lewis borrowed the phrase "mere Christianity" from the seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Baxter; Lewis says as much in his book called--wait for it--Mere Christianity. Lewis also uses the phrase with some regularity in other writings, as indicated here. For instance, in his famous...
Read more → 16 Jul 2018
Posted by Joseph Minich 
Christians struggle with two kinds of assurance - assurance that God loves them and assurance that God likes them. We might immediately cringe at such language as overly anthropomorphic and sentimental. I want to forestall this reaction, however, by admitting that such language can and has been used...
Read more → 16 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
As we've already seen, the first two poets W.H. Auden mentions in his literary catalog in New Year Letter, Dante and William Blake, are both included in the syllabus for the course he taught at the University of Michigan in 1941. The same is true of the third, Arthur Rimbaud, whose prose work A Season...
Read more → 15 Jul 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
So let's talk about effeminacy. This came up as final point of criticism in my Mere Orthodoxy critique of the gay Christianity of Revoice and Spiritual Friendship. Now, I knew that "going there" would upset a lot of people. It's basically touching the third rail to even say the word "effeminate" today....
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