Church History
The feel of dirt mattered to Wolfgang Musculus. Common dust and clay and grass accompanied many of his formative experiences like sod stuck to a child’s knee. [...]
Outside the Catholic vicar-general’s house in Geneva, a large mob of priests congealed in the thin sunlight one autumn morning in 1532. Inside, Guillaume Farel, the French Protestant missionary who had stopped in Geneva, was summoned to answer the accusations of ten canons of the cathedral chapter. […]
On Christmas Day 1653, a few weeks after Oliver Cromwell had been sworn in as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a minister named John Boatman insisted on conducting a festive Communion service at his church in Norwich. […]
Whoever . . . eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body […]
On June 8, 1554, John Calvin labored, as usual, in haste. “I have no time to write at the moment,” he told Guillaume Farel, “because it is nearly time for my theology lecture, and I have not yet had the opportunity to reflect on what I will say.” […]
The Marburg Colloquy (1529) may have been the best chance the Reformation ever had to reconcile the early German Lutheran and Swiss Reformed parties into a doctrinally unified Protestantism. […]
“Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572–1725,” by Amanda C. Pipkin
Oxford University Press | 2022 | 288 pages (hardcover) | $100.00 When I first noticed the publication of Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572–1725, I was curious to read it. It revealed, the description said, the vital contribution made by devout women “to the spread and practice of the Reformed faith […]
*** Cambridge University Press | 2022 | 236 pages (paperback) | $39.99 As an American who used to live in the UK, British news commentary on American politics always left me with a sense of dysphoria. Although they named the right topics and assessed them in terms of familiar-sounding categories, I was always left with […]
There is a myth about theology that it is written in open, expansive, even leisured times of quiet reflection. To write a commentary on a book of Scripture, or a treatise on some point of doctrine, or an entire system of theology, or an individual sermon—well, perhaps not a sermon—happens on its own schedule, taking […]
“Apply yourself day and night to reading the Scriptures. Sleep should overtake you while your book is in your hand, and the sacred page will welcome your nodding head like a pillow.” —Jerome *** The Why and How of Lectio Divina The canonical Christian Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, is not only the […]
There is very little in the history of Christianity about which one may find unbroken consensus. And yet for at least fifteen hundred years, Christians agreed almost without exception that the Song of Songs spoke principally not of love between human beings but of the relationship between God and God’s people. At first blush, such […]
What hath the Reformation to do with stoves? In 1550, Alsatian Reformer Martin Bucer prepared a gift for the Protestant King of England, Edward VI: his monumental book De regno Christi or Kingdom of Christ. Bucer had much for which to be thankful. He had been exiled from Strasbourg the year before, when various rites […]
by Franciscus Junius; translated by Joshua Schendel The following is a translation of Franciscus Junius’s (1545–1602) De Fide Iustificante, a set of twelve theses over which Junius presided while they were publicly defended at Leiden University sometime in the 1590s. The text of this disputation is taken from Francisci Iunii Opuscula theologica selecta, ed. Abraham […]
“Reclaiming the Reformation: Christ for You in Community,” by Magnus Persson, translated by Bror Erickson
*** 1517 Publishing | 2021 | 224 pages (paperback) | $21.85 Magnus Persson, a successful pastor in the charismatic church for many years, is now a minister in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church. How did that happen? In Reclaiming the Reformation, Persson answers that question en route to offering a larger call to reformational Christianity. […]
Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Platter traveled with five friends through Switzerland, stopping in a small village en route to St. Gallen to attend the Mass. After Vespers, the early evening service, one of the priests called them heretics because they had come from the city of Zurich, which no longer considered the pope […]