The Sojourn

Tag: Fred Sanders

  • A Sentence That Stretches Into Eternity

    The tension (a weak word) between the temporality of sentences and the eternity that would render them and the strivings they portray superfluous is powerfully captured in my final example, a sentence from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although I have read and taught this sentence hundreds of times, it never fails to knock my…

  • Learning to See Through the Eyes of our Forebears

    Christian classics—such as Athanasius’ treatise On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions—possess the ability to tether us to our collective past, offering us resources that not only inform us about our faith but also reveal the blind spots of our own chronological parochialism. They anchor us to a continuous tradition of reflection, allowing us to see…

  • What Matters Supremely

    What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in…

  • Have We Been Transformed?

    The ultimate test of whether we have grasped theological truth is thus not so much whether we have comprehended it rationally, but whether it has transformed us experientially. In an important sense, we are not called on to master theology, but to allow it to master us. Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought,…

  • Coffee with Jim

    One of the things [the students at Tyndale] particularly treasured about Packer was his willingness to talk theology over the college breakfast table. The students would ask him about the great theological questions of the day—the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom, to give one obvious example. Packer did not give them pre-packaged answers;…

  • The Most Powerful Help to the Reformation

    Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it…

  • The Happy Land of the Trinity

    This inner life that God lives, in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is a livelier life than any other life. We know about it because we have overheard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves with the intent that we overhear them and be brought into the conversation. Simply knowing…

  • The Boldness of New Testament Doctrine

    Is it too bold of us to declare what God was like, or what he was doing, before creation? It requires boldness, to be sure, but only the boldness of the New Testament. One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make…

  • The Good News of God For An Oblivious Bride

    …When we lose our ability to see the Trinity as directly connected to the gospel, we tend to reduce it to an issue of authority and mental obedience. No wonder, then, that the doctrine of the Trinity has been treated as something of a burden by many evangelicals. But this dysfunction of the doctrine is…