The Calvinist International
In a previous post, we looked at Melanchthon’s response to the birth of Joachim Camerarius’s daughter and to the death of his own son, Georg, in August of 1529. Two days after that event, Martin Luther wrote to his friend Justus Jonas about Georg’s death and Melanchthon’s grief. (The letter is mentioned here.) Luther notes […]
In the prefatory address of the Institutes of the Christian Religion to King Francis I, appended to the work from its first appearance in 1536 (though it undergoes expansion over time), John Calvin gives a full-throated defense of the evangelical cause in France in the tradition of Justin Martyr’s First Apology. In it, he attempts, in the […]
The recent shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs has generated a lot of media discussion, even though we know very little about the specifics of the situation at this time. The shooter may or may not have been motivated by pro-life activism, and he may or may not have been moved by overheated […]
What is the historian supposed to do? How does his task relate to that of other kinds of writer? This is a question that exercised ancient historians and others who theorized about history in antiquity. Cicero was one of those who did the latter, and in On the Laws 1.4-5 he gives a brief summary […]
This post is slightly out of the ordinary for TCI, but reflection on rhetoric is always useful for people who use language and wish to use it effectively. Last night I came across a sentence in Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man that I read several times because it was so pleasant. Here it is, together with […]
There is a well-worn saying (and we should all try to wear it well) that the abuse of a good thing does not take away its proper use (abusus non tollit usum). So, for instance, the fact that Bobby Knight might use a chair as a weapon of his warfare does not destroy the additional fact […]
Analogy, and especially Trinitarian analogy, gets a bad rap in theology. See, for instance, St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies. Trinitarian analogies, it is said, always end up in some kind of heresy, whether modalism, Arianism, or something else. I’d like to offer some resistance to this criticism on the grounds that it misunderstands the way in […]
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 […]
It is difficult, or rather impossible, for human beings to conceptualize divine sempiternity and simultaneity. We are by nature creatures of succession and cannot conceive of anything otherwise: even if we want to affirm the truth of God’s eternal present, we must do so without understanding what that really means. We can only gesture towards […]
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 […]