Essay / Art

Shraga Weil's Ram in the Thicket

by Fred Sanders on

Shraga Weil (1918-2009) was an Israeli painter who also did a lot of printmaking throughout his artistic career. I know he made prints because late in 2020 I came across one of them in an antique store at a deep…

Essay / Theology

Christmas Trinity

by Fred Sanders on

Here's something I wrote for Christmas 2020. I composed it to work best as a Twitter thread, and I'm not sure if it works as well as a blog post. But I wanted to make it available here at a…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

"The Holy Spirit Teaches us to Die Faithfully."

by Fred Sanders on

Dr. Ephraim Radner delivered a memorable paper at the 2020 Los Angeles Theology Conference last January. Those of us in the audience were struck by the depth and honesty of what he shared that day about how the modern world…

Essay / Theology

Adding Eternal Generation

by Fred Sanders on

The publication of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, Second Edition presents an opportunity to consider the difference the doctrine of eternal generation can make in trinitarian theology. The opportunity arises from the fact that Grudem denied eternal generation in the first…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

Christomorphic Pneumatology

by Fred Sanders on

Dr. Lucy Peppiatt was one of the plenary speakers at the 2020 Los Angeles Theology Conference, and published her paper as a chapter in the resulting book, The Third Person of the Trinity (just out this month from Zondervan Academic).…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

The Presence(s) of the Holy Spirit

by Fred Sanders on

Dr. Daniel L. Hill wrote the chapter ""Holy Pedagogue, Perfecting Guide: The Holy Spirit's Presence in Creation" in the book I recently co-edited with Oliver Crisp, The Third Person of the Trinity: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Zondervan Academic, Dec. 2020).…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

"The Problem of Thirdness"

by Fred Sanders on

At least one chapter in The Third Person of the Trinity directly addresses how odd it is to call the Holy Spirit "third," what we might mean by doing so, and in what sense doing so might signal a theological…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

Unity, Spirit, and Church

by Fred Sanders on

I've been asking the authors of chapters from our recent book The Third Person of the Trinity (Zondervan Academic, Dec. 2020) to explain a little bit about what's in each of their chapters. By the time the book appears in…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

A Black American Pneumatology of Freedom

by Fred Sanders on

The new book that Oliver Crisp and I co-edited, The Third Person of the Trinity (Zondervan, Dec 2020), has a dozen chapters exploring the doctrine of the Holy Spirit from a number of angles. I'd like to draw your attention…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

Spiritual Enlightenment and Pneumatological Epistemology

by Fred Sanders on

Daniel Castelo is Professor of Dogmatic and Constructive Theology at Seattle Pacific University and Seminary. He was one of the plenary speakers at the 2020 Los Angeles Theology Conference on the Holy Spirit, and contributed chapter 5 to the resulting…

Essay / The Third Person of the Trinity

Filioque and Divine Missions

by Fred Sanders on

Adonis Vidu is Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He contributed chapter two to the new collection of essays on pneumatology that Oliver Crisp and I edited, The Third Person of the Trinity: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics. I knew…

Essay / Theology

A Technique of Indirect Communication

by Fred Sanders on

I just noticed an author using a technique for communicating very difficult subject matter, and I wanted to make a note of it. I've seen it employed in various kinds of writing, but my main interest in it is as…