Evening Prayer

McNiell, John Thomas. The History and Character of Calvinism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Dr. McNeils affords a picture of the numbers of immigrants from other nations to Geneva-- Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, Scotsmen and Englishmen. Over 5000 immigrants, thanks to religious persecutions performed against Bible-people by Papist rulers (180-181). The Spaniards were so loving and apostolic, e.g., Emperor Philip II. That “historical cat” can not be walked back. Greg Allison’s “Historical Theology:” Prof. Allison retails and briefly details the Christology of kenoticists, Schleiermacher’s revisionism, and the revisionism of Strauss, Remarius, and, the most famous, Rudie Bultmann, the dead man in this life and in the next life (383). According to Rudie, the chief duty of the NT theologian and pulpiteers is to “demythologize” the NT. In no sense was Rudie a Christian Churchman, but was a decadent and damned man according to the NT. Thank God for Dr. Gaffin of WTS who forced us to digest Bultmann and defend the historic view. Edward Cairns’s “Christianity Through the Centuries:” Further information is given on John Colet, Erasmus, and Reuchlin, all students in the school at Florence. Details on all three are given, including Reuchlin’s inspirational work in Hebrew. Of note, Cairns dubs Colet as an “Oxford Reformer.” Colet attended to the text of St. Paul without the allegorizing (289). Millard Erickson’s “Christian Theology:” Prof. Erickson’s slow-walk on immanence as corrupted by the decadent types ended up effacing and relativizing the Theanthropic man and immanentizing sin. Jesus ends up being the “best of the breed,” different in degree only not in kind (306). Tillach makes a cameo appearance. Justo Gonzalez’s “History of Christianity: Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation:” Augustine of Hippo—a tortuous path to faith, ministry and to becoming the influential theologian of the Western Church. His life is details from Tagaste, Africa, to Milan and back to Hippo, including his foray into rhetoric and Manicheanism (243).