The Calvinist International
Last week I posted a Christmas poem by Geerhardus Vos. That, however, was not the only such poem he wrote. The second poem in an earlier volume of verse, called Charis (1931), bears the same title as the poem in the previous post: “Nativity.” Like the later poem, this earlier one focuses a good amount […]
Herewith another Christmas poem by another American Presbyterian: this time a man named Louis F. Benson (1855-1930), whose memory has mostly faded away. Benson was a Philadelphian who went to Penn, then was a lawyer, then a Presbyterian minister in Germantown, PA, and then a writer, as well as an editor at the Presbyterian Board […]
While we’re on the subject of Christmas: I noted in my most recent post that Geerhardus Vos fancied himself something of a poet; at the link you can see his poem on Christ’s Nativity. Vos was not unique in this predilection. One of his Princeton colleagues, B.B. Warfield, also wrote a number of poems, and […]
At various points, we’ve discussed the celebration of Christmas and other holidays in various sectors of the Reformed tradition, including among some conservative Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, as well as time-keeping more generally. The same favorable attitude we see in Hodge continues into the twentieth century. J. Gresham Machen Thus J. Gresham Machen, the […]
The predecessor of the Order of Worship for the Reformed Church in the United States, the Liturgy, or, Order of Christian Worship (1858), which I have discussed previously (e.g. here), includes a section of “Prayers for the Festival Seasons,” the material of which is (at least, mostly) included in the later Order but distributed in […]
Anyone familiar with the Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie, knows that old-fashioned Presbyterians did not celebrate holidays. Even Christmas was seen as illegitimate, and Christmas was not celebrated in early Puritan America. This stance has given way pretty decisively, and in the present day, the overwhelming majority of even conservative Presbyterians think Christmas is at least permissible. […]
Two days ago, I made some introductory remarks about the famous hymn of Ambrose known to many speakers of English as “Savior of the Nations, Come,” and focused specifically on its authenticity and ancient witness. Today we will look at the first stanza of the hymn, which is omitted from our modern version. This, then, […]
Over the past few years I’ve posted Latin Advent and Christmas hymns with English translation and some comments. This year we’re going to look at Ambrose’s hymn Intende, qui regis Israel. Parts of this hymn are familiar in English as “Savior of the Nations, Come,” which my family has recently been learning along with some (other) […]
The following is a Christmas devotional meditation by Abraham Kuyper, drawn from his collection Honey from the Rock (Honig uit de Rotssteen), vol. 2, no. 1, translated and generously made available by James DeJong, president emeritus of Calvin Theological Seminary. DeJong is working on translating these devotionals in connection with the Dutch Reformed Translation Society (DRTS). As […]
In his Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis implies that modern Christians often miss a crucial aspect of the nativity. In celebrating the peace and joy that the infant Jesus embodies for Israel and for the world it is easy to lose sight of his combined priest-kingly activity of “binding the strong man” and destroying […]