Damn It All to Hell

(The original version of this essay was published on September 25, 2019, on this site under a different title. It was intended to be a reflection on David Bentley Hart's then recently released That All Shall Be Saved, a polemic in favor of universalism, the promise that every last human being will spend eternity in …

Rob Bell’s Personal Hell

(I wrote this back in 2011, I think, and never published it because...I don’t remember why. I just stopped caring or something or other. But I found it while digging through an old hard drive. So I publish it here and now as one more archival piece for when I’m dead and the three people …

Is Inerrancy Blasphemous?

Nota bene: This essay was never published on the old Strange Herring site. It was finished sometime in mid-2015 and left as a draft. The reasons for that will become apparent shortly. I am publishing it on July 28, 2016, because, well, in revisiting my digital oevre, I thought it a shame to have wasted …

Martin Luther on Trial

Any actors among my readers? If so, any of you ever itched to play Satan, Hitler, or Johann Tetzel? How about the greater Reformer Martin Luther? Or his wife, perhaps? A call went out a couple of weeks ago: auditions for a new play starring Max McLean called The Trial of Martin Luther. It's being …

Luther to Enter Rome, Again

Oh, sure, now... Next month a hilltop square in Rome is due to be named Piazza Martin Lutero, in memory of Luther’s achievements. The site chosen is the Oppian Hill, a park area that overlooks the Colosseum. The move has been six years in a making, following a request made by the Seventh-day Adventists, a Protestant denomination, …

Do You Worship in a State-Approved Church?

So now that the call for pulling churches' tax exemptions is gathering Internet speed, I wonder if future commissars will make a distinction between "bad" churches and "good" churches. The former would have their charitable status eradicated, while the latter would continue to enjoy the tax benefits of getting on History's good side, and no negative stigma would …

The Novel Is Protestant. What Does that Make the Haiku?

I consider myself pretty well-read. You probably consider yourself pretty well-read. Well, compared to Joseph Bottum, author of such bestselling Amazon singles as Dakota Christmas and Wise Guy (not to mention An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America), we're downright remedial. Think I'm exaggerating? (As if I ever exaggerate...) Check out, for …

If Famous Preachers Left Yelp Reviews of Lakewood Church

Luther, M. Wittenberg 95 Friends "This miserable jackanapes who makes a pretense of preaching would have the Christian avoid tribulations, which are twofold: from divine wrath and from divine goodness. But this miniature Demas, in love with this present world, judges both only according to outward appearances, and makes himself a theologian of glory. In the face of …

Who Can Forgive Whose Sins?

So I logged on to the Mockingbird blog today and went searching for audio from their annual NYC Conference, seeing as it featured this year a Lutherany Presbyterian (Tullian Tchividjian) and a mainliny Lutheran (Nadia Bolz-Weber), which I thought would yield some interesting MP4age. The Mockingbirders are themselves low-churchy Anglicany Episcs,* as opposed to mainliny …

Are Germans Reliving Their 16th Century Lutheran Past?

I'm always fascinated by how the Reformation is portrayed in the popular media and the press. Almost everyone gets it half-right, and usually it's the wrong half. This article is three years old, but it was still enlightening on a few fronts. For example, I did not know that Angela Merkel was the daughter of …