by Joshua Shaw A debate raged in the last century between two (Protestant and) German scholars by the names Kurt Aland and Joachim Jeremias.[i] There has since been at least one colossal undertaking on the evidence regarding baptism from 2nd Temple Judaism to the 4th and 5th centuries of the church.[ii] The contention was whether… Read More Does Original Sin Really Explain Infant Baptism? An Old Debate
by Joshua Shaw D. A. Schlatter is, to my mind, the most underrated Protestant theologian of the last century. I am tempted to compare him to other great Protestant figures of the 19th and 20th century, but he would rebuke me. We introduced him and a characteristic element of his theology and thinking in a… Read More D. A. Schlatter (1852-1938) on Catholics and Protestants
by Joshua Shaw BF Westcott, whom we have introduced in a previous post, compared himself on more than one occasion to a Quaker (see here); the likeness might have died on the surface, as it were, of the comparison (at least for all of us), if he had not written a short essay on the… Read More “By the Spirit Let Us Walk”: Westcott on George Fox and the Quakers
by Joshua Shaw The distance between our previous few posts – those on Westcott and Hort – and the Christmas season is not so far as you might think. These men did not lead cloistered lives, however much they learned from monks and monastic life. One legacy they left has to do with the well-known… Read More “Sermons in Stones”: Lessons and Carols from Cathedrals
by Joshua Shaw In a previous post on Karl Barth’s noble response to the Third Reich, we saw his absolute rejection of the then current Zeitgeist. While great, one seems to hear the echoes of the docetic dualism for which Barth is often (in the circles of his “haters”) infamous. I wrote then (quoting Barth),… Read More The Selflessness of Seeing: Adolf Schlatter’s Theological Method
by Joshua Shaw In another post we will look at the critical methods of these men (as well as others – Schlatter, Hodge, Bavinck, Lightfoot, etc.) in a more direct way; for now we consider it from the perspective of the last post – the relationship of man to Creation, the relationship of this world… Read More “Christianity Shrinks From No Test”: Westcott and Hort on Biblical Criticism (2)
The Epistle reading in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (see here for a nicely bound, affordable edition from Everyman) for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity is Romans 8:18-23, which reads as follows, I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed… Read More “Creation groaneth and travaileth together”: The Fourth Sunday after Trinity (1)
by Joshua Shaw Matthew Gaetano, in a previous post, has touched on C. S. Lewis’s idea of the “good dreams” of pagans which were fulfilled in the Gospel. This post treats another Cambridge scholar writing and thinking in the same vein as Lewis. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) was an extraordinary New Testament scholar who brought… Read More Good Dreams and Better Prayers: CS Lewis and BF Westcott on Plato
by Joshua Shaw I happened to be reading a very apt passage from Thomas Traherne just a few days after Matt’s latest post. The coincidence seemed too perfect to forgo at least a short addendum to his post. He mentioned there various trends of scholarship concerning the conception of wisdom: when did it change? Is… Read More Thomas Traherne on Philosophia – the Love of Wisdom
by Joshua Shaw Karl Barth (1886 – 1968) is a controversial and, as seems these days all too common, a polarizing figure; for some he was an outgrowth of the 19th century’s decadent theology, for others the greatest of modern theologians. This fact alone (his polarizing character and the subsequent polarized characterisations) suggests to me… Read More “The Holy Ghost needs no ‘Movements'”: Karl Barth in and on the Third Reich