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Keith D. Stanglin Jacob Arminius served for 15 years as Pastor at The Old Church in Amsterdam In my previous blog post , I raised the old theological and practical challenge of the assurance of salvation, an issue that was central to the Protestant reformers in general and to Jacob Arminius (1559–1609) in particular.  He identified two opposite problems related to assurance.  Previously, I discussed his treatment of the first problem—despair or hopelessness about salvation, w

Keith D. Stanglin Assurance of salvation was a central and motivating concern of the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther sought assurance in the sacrament of penance, but to no avail.  He found it finally in his discovery of justification by grace alone through faith alone.  This concern for assurance continued among the Reformed (Calvinists).  To pick one example among many, notice the presence of assurance in the opening Question and Answer of the Heidelberg Catechism (1

Keith D. Stanglin “Can Christianity overcome its dogmatism without losing its identity?” A former colleague of mine once posed this question to our mutual students. It is provocative; “dogma” has been a nasty word for a long time. And the assumption among many—including many Christians—is that dogmatism is something that must be overcome. Though never put in these exact words, the underlying concern or logic apparently runs something like this: “Dogmatism is obviously evil; i

by Todd Hall What’s in a name? Well, it turns out that the answer to that question is “a whole lot.” Names can be venerated and names can be tarnished. They can follow someone around, and they can come to symbolize character and personality. Names matter.   I came across an interesting fact several years ago when thinking about this commandment: Adolf was a popular name in Germany prior to World War 2, with several notable rulers of Germany as well as Saints and others appear

By Ben Peterson, CCS Fellow The Center for Christian Studies is happy to congratulate Dr. Ben Peterson, CCS Fellow and guest editor of JCS II/2, "The Church and the Polis ," on the publication of his forthcoming book, Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order , set to be released in June of this year by Bloomsbury Academic. We are happy to share with our CCS community the preface to the book, included below! From the book descripti

Keith D. Stanglin In my previous post , I identified three truths about technology that are conveyed in many ancient stories.  First, technology always comes with negative, often unintended consequences; every technology does or undoes something.  Second, the people closest to the technology—its creators and purveyors—have the hardest time seeing or foreseeing those negative effects.  Third, they and the technophiles in charge have incentive to ignore or suppress those negati

Keith D. Stanglin When survivors of the great, primeval deluge decided to unite their efforts toward an innovative project, they said, “Come, let us make bricks” (Gen 11:3).  The oven-baked brick was a new invention, allowing builders to raise taller and stronger structures than ever before—in this case, a tower.  The people’s aim was to make a name for themselves and not to scatter (Gen 11:4).  The biblical text does not say exactly who was calling for the bricks and the con

What is the greatest miracle in the entire Bible?  How would you answer that question, and how would you make a case for your response?  Perhaps the greatest miracle is the resurrection of Christ.  According to 1 Corinthians 15, Christ’s resurrection is certainly of first importance.  The faith stands or falls with the resurrection.  If faith in the resurrection is granted, then the other miracle stories are not really hard to believe.  But there is a miracle that surpasses t

All of us, no matter our race or age or sex or culture, have lived through (and will live through) difficult twists and turns in life. Some of those were beyond our control, and some were of our own making. Very often we find ourselves asking how we might carry on, how we might take the broken pieces of the life we knew and put them back together. How do we make something meaningful, something beautiful, out of so many crooked lines? At moments like these, we can find the Aut

My grandmother, Juanita Saxon, went to sleep in the Lord in May of 2017. She passed after a long, strenuous battle with congestive heart failure (and other ailments). My grandmother was, to me, the very picture of Christian faithfulness. By her last breath she had fully formed her life into the image of her Lord, sharing in his passion in her own, and finding herself finally to be alive and ready to be at rest in him.

In 1 Peter 1:13, the writer says, “Therefore, having girded the loins of your mind…”  What a strange phrase!  “Gird your loins”?  What does it mean?  Not much to modern Anglophones, apparently, for no mainstream modern translations say that.  “Prepare your minds for action” is the translation of choice for most.  The NIV has “with minds that are alert….”  But preparing for action and being alert is not quite the same as girding your loins. This is a clothing metaphor—one of m

Like most congregations, the church that I attend has our Sunday hymns projected onto the screen at the front of the building. This has been very helpful for several members who struggle with eyesight problems. But unlike some congregations, we’ve kept our hymnals in the pew as well. I always like to hold the hymnal in my hand and sing along that way—usually because the projected songs don’t have shape notes, which is the only way I can read music, but also so I can reflect o

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1737 A few years ago, in preparation for Easter, I preached through the various people surrounding Jesus’ passion, using Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart’s wonderful little book (a collection of sermons), At the Cross: Meditations on People Who Were There  as a springboard for imagination and interpretation.   One of those homilies was on Simon of Cyrene. I can hear my old homiletics teacher now: “How can you put together

Headstone in San Marcos City Cemetery, San Marcos, Texas * For the past few years, my parents, as they age, have made increasingly robust efforts to—how shall I put this delicately?—get rid of their junk.  I must immediately qualify that statement in two important ways.  First, I am grateful that they are running it all by their children; we get first dibs.  Second, much of it is decidedly not junk: Granddaddy’s (and now Dad’s) 1960 Chevy Impala, his antique pitch pipe, the V

by Keith D. Stanglin, Executive Director, Center for Christian Studies I don’t watch much TV, but I confess to getting sucked into a football game now and then.  And despite my best efforts to avoid the advertisements, three ads have recently caught my attention.  To be more specific, they creeped me out.  They are all promoting a feature called “ Apple Intelligence ,” Apple’s new platform for artificial intelligence.  I’ll describe them in the order in which I saw them.     

The third-century church father, Origen, in response to the pagan criticism that Christians don’t do enough to help the emperor, claimed that, on the contrary, Christians do more good for their respective countries than do the rest of mankind.  Because of the prayers that they offer and the lives that they live, Christians “render to the emperors divine help….  Indeed, the more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors—more so than the soldiers who go o

The central theme of the Center for Christian Studies is “Scholarship for the Church.” It is what guides us in all of the resources we produce. Whereas most scholarship has its proper place and audience in the academy (and rightly so), advancing human knowledge and understanding, CCS’ scholarship is meant to directly  help the church better understand, practice, and pass on their faith, to train teachers of teachers (2 Timothy 2:2).   The phrase, “scholarship for the church,”

"Whereas the politics of Pilate washes its hands of the blood of an innocent man, the innocent man takes the blood of all the guilty upon himself and stretches his arms out on the cross." “Political cowardice” is almost a redundant statement, isn’t it? It seems like one of the qualifications of a politician at mid-level government—any government—is to cover their own… I mean, to protect their position at all costs. Think of all the bureaucrats and elected politicians who turn

A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a seminar on a particular theological topic. In addition to the main topic that I was invited to address, I was also asked to be prepared to recommend and briefly summarize a few books that are outside my field of scholarship. In reality, almost nothing that is non-fiction is really irrelevant to a historical theologian. But I get the idea—something not directly about church history or Christian theology. In fact, I quite enjoyed t

In my previous post, I suggested some ways that the church can engage in grief ministry before tragedy happens. I remain committed to the idea that most grief ministry is preparatory, but I want to offer some suggestions for ministry at the moment (and throughout the season) of grief. These suggestions are not new, but they are those that I have found helpful both in personal experience and in my ministering to other grievers. Let me begin by explaining that, as in all of my