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The Ultimate Love

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Deification Through the Cross:
An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation
by khaled anatolios
eerdmans, 464 pages, $50

Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

During the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius in the middle of the second century, an unnamed Roman matron furtively became a Christian and not only left her old way of life behind but invited her husband to do the same. When this proved ineffectual, she decided to leave him and wrote up a repudium , a lawful bill of divorce. Her outraged husband went to the authorities and revealed his wife’s new creed, whereupon she was arrested. He went on to denounce his wife’s teacher in the faith, Ptolemaeus, who was also duly shackled. When asked if he bore the name of Jesus Christ, Ptolemaeus joyfully declared that he did and was condemned to execution. Seeing such a brutal, albeit “legal,” injustice, a certain Lucius loudly denounced the cruelty of the Roman official, Urbicus. Turning to Lucius, Urbicus inquired whether he, too, was a Christian. Lucius’ reply of “ Certissime ” earned him a place alongside Ptolemaeus in the executioner’s chamber. When a third, unidentified onlooker also protested such treatment, he was ordered to join the others in martyrdom that day. Upon hearing of this chain of cruelty, Justin Martyr wrote his Second Apology to the Roman senate, protesting that Christians were maltreated for no other reason than because they bore the name of Christ.

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The Trinity in German Thought

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

In writing both of his Catechisms of 1529, Martin Luther attempted to highlight the trinitarian structure of Christianity by reducing the Roman twelve-article catechesis to a more explicit three-article one. It simply stated belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with assent to the “holy Christian Church, the community of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and an everlasting life” treated collectively under the working of the Holy Spirit. However, as Samuel Powell shows in The Trinity in German Thought , Protestant theology on the Trinity since Luther’s time has hardly been as clear.

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