Year: 2012
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Lent’s Road to Eternity
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?—J.R.R. Tolkien, from his lecture titled “On Fairy Stories,” given in 1939. As a pre-adolescent kid growing up in…
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Tom Smail (1928-2012): "The Spirit is Given from the Cross"
Tom Smail, evangelical and charismatic British theologian of the Trinity, died last week (Feb 15). A few obituaries have appeared from those who knew him or studied with him. I knew him only from his remarkable books, which were always exquisitely balanced between tradition and creativity. As something of an evangelical-charismatic statesman, Smail tended to…
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Foreword to Harrower's Trinitarian Self and Salvation
Scott Harrower of the Melbourne School of Theology has just published a book called Trinitarian Self and Salvation: An Evangelical Engagement with Rahner’s Rule (Wipf & Stock, 2012). About a decade ago, I wrote my own “evangelical engagement with Rahner’s Rule,” so Scott asked me to write the foreword for his project. I really appreciated…
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R. T. France (1938-2012), New Testament Scholar
Last week, R. T. France passed away. There are notices of his passing at several Bible blogs, including this one at the Evangelical Textual Criticism site. France taught in numerous places over the years, and wrote many helpful works. Evangelical Bible scholars can testify to his substantive contribution to the field. I want to praise…
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Notes for a Doctrine of Creation
Just a few thoughts here, brief notes on how a doctrine of creation ought to be handled in systematic theology. I state them as theses, as if I am declaring how every theologian ought to handle the doctrine. But really I’m talking to myself in public. 1. Work backwards. The doctrine of creation occurs early…
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The Economic Trinity Communicates the Immanent Trinity
When Kevin Vanhoozer intervenes in the recent discussion of the doctrine of God, he does so by making several strategic moves. But the move behind them all is his insistence that we’ve got to get the doctrine of the Trinity right. And “getting it right” means describing the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity…
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John Hick (1922-2012), Philosopher of Religion
John Hick, a major philosopher of religion, has died at age 90. Friends and students had just brought out a festschrift in his honor weeks before his death. Hick’s theological conclusions were decidedly on the liberal side of the spectrum, and his intellectual legacy will be the greatest among those who are least concerned about…
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Sharing Our Solitude
A piece I wrote, “Sharing Our Solitude,” is one of January’s three main articles in The Examined Life. The issue is all about ‘enduring through suffering,’ and, among others, it includes an article on interacting with suffering in a classroom setting, an apology for watching sad films, and an artistic and symbolic exploration of the color…
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Stick Figure Theology: Annie Vallotton
Imagine being an artist commissioned to illustrate the entire Bible. From the epic stories to the pithy proverbs, from psalms of praise to prophets of doom, from the life of Jesus to his parables, you were supposed to produce pictures for everything. Now imagine that you were limited to the most minimal of visual means…
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The Conversion of St. Paul
Christmas was exactly one month ago, and now, we celebrate another birth, or should I say , a new birth: the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, once fierce persecutor of the followers of Christ, now a formidable soldier for Christ. We can say with certainty that ignorance of St. Paul is ignorance of Christ, especially…
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Not Your Old New Trinitarianism, A New New Trinitarianism
“Remythologizing” is a mouthful of a word, and it may scare people a few away from Kevin Vanhoozer’s fascinating book Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010: Cambridge University Press). Vanhoozer explains in great detail what he means by it, and I won’t rehearse that here. But one of the reasons he picked the…
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Close Attention to How God Says What He Says
Vanhoozer says “My wager is that this brief detour into the dispute over the meaning of Dostoevsky’s authorship will yield theological dividends for understanding God’s communicative relation to the world.” (p. 311) Indeed it does, in two ways. First, it sharpens the meaning of divine authorship in a way that clarifies the God-world relationship. “God…