18 Sep 2019
Posted by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto 
With the recent publication of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics and the forthcoming first English translation of his Christian Worldview, more and more readers are discovering the genius of the Dutch neo-Calvinist afresh. Picking up Bavinck’s Ethics or Dogmatics, however, can be daunting. While Bavinck’s...
Read more → 13 Sep 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
At long last, below you will find the final prayer included at the end of Andreas Hyperius's Elementa Christianae Religionis. This one is to be used before reading or hearing the Bible. Once again, the attempt (doubtless insufficient) was made to put it in Cranmerian Plain Style. The content of the prayer,...
Read more → 02 Sep 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
The next of Hyperius’s prayers, this one for the evening, is translated below. It is a good bit longer than his morning prayer; but it is also quite good. After this, only one more remains to be done. An evening prayer. Lord God, most generous Father, for thy kindnesses both internal and external,...
Read more → 29 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
A couple of years ago I translated two prayers by Andreas Hyperius from his Elementa Christianae Religionis (Elements of the Christian Religion). There are a few more from that final section of the work, so I figured, well, why not. They’re good. All of them, including those I translated back in 2017,...
Read more → 19 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Plato, in the Phaedo, had Socrates claim that philosophy was “practice for dying and death.” It was a sentiment that was to exercise great influence down through the centuries, all the way to Heidegger’s “Being-toward-death” and beyond. (That last part works better if you say it in the voice...
Read more → 14 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
[This post is a little bit of an awkward fit for TCI, but I need somewhere to put it. And Melville...was...raised as a Calvinist...so...I guess it works?] The 200th anniversary of the birth of America’s greatest writer of fiction just passed. I mean Herman Melville, naturally. Melville was more...
Read more → 12 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In Institutes 3.3.19, John Calvin gives a “summary of the gospel” (cf. 3.3.1), in which he makes the important point that “the gospel,” the good news that Scripture and the church proclaim, includes not only the forgiveness or remission of sins (justification), but also renewal (sanctification),...
Read more → 06 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
On August 1, 1537, Philip Melanchthon wrote a letter to the Lutheran poet Eobanus Hessus intended to serve as prefatory material for his versification of the Psalter, the Psalterium Davidis carmine redditum (David’s Psalter Rendered in Verse), in which Hessus put all 150 Psalms into Latin elegiac couplets....
Read more → 01 Aug 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In Sermon 162C (Dolbeau 10), on Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2 (on the history of the exegesis of this passage, cf. my essay here), Augustine gives a helpful sketch of the various “levels” on which one can speak of the genesis and authorship or “voice” of Scripture, or, to put it another...
Read more → 31 Jul 2019
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
George Buchanan was perhaps the finest Latin poet to write after the close of antiquity. I’ve discussed him previously here, here, and here. One of his most-loved works in verse is his Poetic paraphrase of the Psalms of David (Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica), the first complete edition of which...
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