Ronald Wells

He opened our eyes to what we all knew but had forgotten: that prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church had devalued the sermon in public worship; the Protestants, in their zeal for the recovery of the scripture, now in their own languages, made the sermon the new focus of public worship, and thereby relegated holy Communion to a secondary place, offering it only once a month, or even, in some cases, just four times a year.

The Bible is a historical book, thus requiring historical tools of analysis, the most basic of which is establishing the context for what is going on in the text. The Bible is also a literary book, thus requiring literary tools of analysis, like asking the genre of a text: a chronicle is not a poem, nor a first-person account, nor a letter of a specific church, nor an apocalypse. There is, in fact, no such thing as “quoting Scripture” with…

The ninety-year life of Roger Schutz ended this past August in a cruel act of violence that violated the entire spirit in which that life had been lived. Even so, as we look back at this remarkable life–a treasure that the Reformed family of churches gave to world Christianity