Behind Door #3
I just finished Diarmaid MacCulloch's new book All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy , which I felt was timely and appropriate as we approach the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses. And I am glad I did, because the book is brilliant and insightful (and more accessible than his massive previous book The Reformation: A History ). There are a number of things that you can talk about with regard to the book, but one thing that struck me from reading it was how the Reformation presented a fundamental choice for Christianity, and how we are still wrestling with the legacy of those choices. To understand the nature of the choice, we should go back and think about Augustine. In the Original Blessing series of posts from last month, we looked at how Augustine sees the physical world as being fundamentally corrupted by the sin of Adam, and how physicality itself as the locus of the human problem generally. This view create...