In the context of Christian theology, what is Tradition? And what is it for? Is it a unified, monolithic body of doctrines, from which we deviate at our peril? Is it a quarry of texts, open to be mined by any and all for juicy quotations? Instead of these images, Matt Jenson offers us the…
Ask what principle Martin Luther put at the center of his Protestant Reformation theology, and you’ll get several good answers: justification by faith alone; the primacy of scriptural authority over ecclesial authority; the theology of the cross. Philip Cary offers another answer to that question, one that is distint from yet fundamentally connected to those…
In the early 6th century, darkness was falling on the Rome’s Western Empire. Old Rome was waning, barbarians sat on the imperial throne, and smouldering tension with the Byzantine Eastern Empire threatened to explode at any moment. In this time of crisis, a man from an old Italian family, trained in orthodox Christianity and classical…
Augustine of Hippo was one of the Fathers of Western Christianity, a Doctor of the Church. No theologian was more widely revered in medieval Europe, and his thought continues to be foundational in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. But Augustine wasn’t European, and only half Roman, and his Christianity was as blended as…
There are some things everyone knows about Protestants. They hate tradition. They’re suspicious of any doctrine or practice that can’t be anchored to a verse. They’re fractious and factious, each their own Luther unwilling to budge from their convictions unless convinced by scripture and sound reason. But sometimes what everyone knows isn’t so–or needn’t be…