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 → 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 → 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 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 → 06 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
The next writer in Auden's judgmental catalog of poets is William Blake. Like Dante and his Commedia, Blake was included in the syllabus of the literature course Auden taught at the University of Michigan the year after he wrote New Year Letter, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature" (the...
Read more → 04 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Prologue. If one is reading a secondary source but also wants to be sure he, you know, knows something, it is advisable to track down primary sources in order to check the veracity of claims made about some figure, text, or whatever. "Trust, but verify," as the Gipper said. Scene: Someone poring over...
Read more → 26 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
This is for the philistines, to help you get in touch with your inner non-philistine and slay the Goliath within you. Dare to be a David! Name-checking one's literary influences has a long pedigree. One might mention Ennius' Pythagorean dream in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him and told him that...
Read more → 22 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Yesterday we saw that Kierkegaard distinguished between a genius and an apostle via the following kinds of binaries: immanence vs. transcendence; inborn talent vs. the exterior call; aesthetic vs. authoritative appeal. A different model of authority that presents some problems for that of Kierkegaard...
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