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Robert Louis Wilken
Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition
From the May 2004 Print EditionIn 1844 Philip Schaff, a Swiss church historian, to the surprise of his academic colleagues, accepted a position at the German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. At the time the seminary, under the leadership of the Reformed theologian John Nevin, was the center of a movement of . . . . Continue Reading »
Last spring on a trip to Erfurt, the medieval university town in Germany famous for its Augustinian cloister in which Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of its population professed adherence to Christianity. In fact, when the topic of religion came up . . . . Continue Reading »
Given the contentiousness of public life in America today it was inevitable that the bulky stone monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments and placed in the rotunda of the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama would provoke controversy. When Judge Roy S. Moore commissioned Richard Hahnemann to . . . . Continue Reading »
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis Modern Library. 170 pp. $19.95 Among the papers left by Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot the Pope on May 13, 1981, was a letter containing this sentence: I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the . . . . Continue Reading »
The arcane academic title of this book” Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity ”offers no clue to its significance or timeliness. The phrase Christian figural reading refers to the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. But for John David Dawson, . . . . Continue Reading »
My worn and heavily marked copy of the original hardback edition of Peter Brown’s biography of St. Augustine, its binding held together by sturdy book tape, sits on a bookshelf close to my desk as it has since it first appeared in 1967. On the inside cover I have a little note, “Reviewed in . . . . Continue Reading »
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intoleranceh. a. drake johns hopkins, 609 pages, $68 The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Romeelizabeth de palma digeser cornell, 199 pages, $39.95 The ritual pronouncement of anathemas against Constantinianism has become so commonplace that . . . . Continue Reading »
The goal of life for Christians is the kingdom of God, but early in the Church’s history the men and women of the desert realized that the practice of the Christian life re quired more proximate goals. In their writings the phrase used most often to depict what one strives for in life’s daily . . . . Continue Reading »
Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies.By André Lacocque and Paul Ricoeur. Translated by David Pellauer.University of Chicago Press. 441 pp. $30. In the wake of the Enlightenment’s assault on tradition no field of theology has suffered more than the study of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Midnight of December 31, 1999 is the symbolic ending of one Christian millennium and the beginning of another. (We say “symbolic,” being well aware of the scholarly consensus regarding the date of Christ’s birth, and the literal claim that the second millennium ends with the end of the year . . . . Continue Reading »
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