The Calvinist International
The eminent English divine Henry More (1618-1647), like many of his Protestant forebears, believed that piety is an essential part of moral philosophy, that is to say, that moral philosophy is not a secular discipline. The individual who seeks true virtue, More believed, would not be satisfied until he discovers the ultimate source of virtue […]
Marsilio Ficino’s argument in chapter 8 of his De Christiana Religione is quite similar to St. Paul’s argument in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians regarding the origin of his Gospel message. There Paul argues that his preaching is not κατὰ ἄνθρωπον (from man) but δι’ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (from a revelation of Jesus Christ). […]
Marsilio Ficino, in chapter 4 of his De Christiana Religione, argues that God does not reject all forms of human worship, even those performed by other religions. Rather, God approves of man’s worship of him and he does not punish every form of false worship equally. Though all forms of religious worship derive, in some […]
Victoria Kahn’s Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance is well worth the read for anyone interested in the topic of political theology, virtue ethics, or the Renaissance and Reformation more broadly. She describes the nature of Renaissance concepts of prudence and rhetoric and its importance for the debate between Erasmus and Luther on the freedom […]
Church history and hagiography are not always so easy to distinguish. We paint certain pictures of personalities with little or no solid evidence, but rather base them on sentiments formed much later (sometimes even sentiments we form internally). An obvious case in point is the way in which Martin Luther is typically thought of as […]
One of the things that we talk about a lot here at TCI is building a culture of persuasion, and one of our favorite bogeymen is the retreat to commitment. These things are of course connected: against the retreat to commitment, we insist that it is in the nature of truth claims to be public truth claims; but neither […]
From Andrew Pettegree’s wonderful Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, we have these reflections on Martin Luther’s view of preaching: Central both to Luther’s concept of the preacher’s art and his extraordinary skill was careful preparation, above all through the reading the Scripture. ‘Some preachers’, he wrote in 1542, ‘are lazy and no good. They do […]
At TCI, one might see a reference every now and again to a “culture of persuasion.” For Bavinck, the propriety of such a vision is rooted in creation itself. A freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that […]