As a follow-up to the last post, I just learned that The Society for the Study of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism is starting up again. Anyone interested in being on the mailing list should contact Brock Bingaman at Loyola University Chicago: BBINGAM@LUC.EDU
A poetic inscription on the Lateran Baptistery in Rome gives a wonderful series of theological metaphors for baptism. John F. Baldovin notes that the inscription is “often attributed to the mid-fifth century pope, Sixtus III.” The inscription reads:
“Here is born in Spirit-soaked fertility/ a brood destined for another City,/ begotten by God’s blowing/ and borne [...]
“Indeed, as we have seen, since the Reformation the emphasis has been placed upon the meal, upon the act of communion and upon the real presence. All this is quite right, but the almost exclusive insistence upon these aspects has tended to rivet the attention of theologians in the tradition of the Reformation, on the [...]
This Christmas, consider supporting the King’s Meadow Endurance Team. George Grant is an advocate for substantive, classical Reformed liturgy, and they have exciting plans to expand into a full liberal arts college!
Read a more detailed letter here.
Although this site continues to get steady traffic, I find myself too busy in my family and my studies to develop it as it could be. If anyone out there would like to contribute, either as a writer or an editor, let me know. The original vision was for this site to be a resource, [...]
I came across an exciting mission opportunity for academics. This organization sends Christian teachers into other countries, finding positions for them in secular universities. A quote on their home-page says it all:
“The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. Change the university and you change the world,”
declared Dr. Charles Malik, former [...]
Interestingly, even though he supported communion in only one species (bread) Nicholas de Cusa linked Eucharistic practice with the health of the church. As summarized by Pelikan, de Cusa argued: “When the love of the church was at its peak, believers communicated often and under both species; when it was only warm, they received more [...]
Stephen Marshall, one of the leading Divines at the Westminster Assembly, ends his A Sermon of the Baptising of Infants thusly:
“Luther tels a Story of a gracious Virgin, who used to get the victory over Satan when he tempted her to any sinne, Satan I may not doe it; Baptizata sum, I am Baptized, and [...]
In a 1978 article, James F. White (the noted liturgical scholar, not the Reformed Baptist apologist!) cautions us against reciting the creeds in worship to the exclusion of praying a full eucharistic prayer:
“The eucharistic prayer functioned for centuries as the Church’s chief summary of faith. Beside it a creed was redundant. It was a sign [...]
Commenting on the Hippolytan Eucharistic anaphora (prayer of thanksgiving), Willimon writes:
“The tone in Hippolytus is one of joyful triumph at the victory of Christ in the war of human liberation. It is an eschatological prayer, a prayer which sings of a New Age in which the whole cosmos is redeemed, all things are being made [...]
