Author: Fred Sanders

This post is just me preemptively sorting out some terminological confusion in academic trinitarian theology, so if you read it and then find yourself asking, “who cares?” you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The answer is, “seven people care.” So if you’re one of those seven, lean in here and looky, because this is…

So I was in church and we were singing that nineteenth-century hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” and that one line “you who sang creation’s story now proclaim Messiah’s birth” got me thinking about how I’ve sometimes wondered who the implied speaker is in Genesis 1, because just saying “Moses” doesn’t account for the…

Today is the official release date of my book, The Triune God, in Zondervan’s ambitious New Studies in Dogmatics series edited by Allen and Swain. Its cover has a nice, minty green color that will look good under your favorite theologian’s Christmas tree. Put a little red bow on it and you’ve got a party. Amazon…

In The Dialogue of Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), she describes how God deals with the widespread human tendency to take good things from God and then forget him. “Those whose love is imperfect,” she reports God as saying, “who love me for my gifts and not for myself the giver, can be and often are…

In mid-January of 2017, the Los Angeles Theology Conference will bring a remarkable group of theologians to Biola University for a two-day discussion of “The Task of Dogmatics.” (Register before the end of November for the early registration discount.) Theology professors in southern California should consider doing what several of us have already gotten into…

The theme for the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society this year is the Trinity, so you can imagine how many sessions there are that I’m eager to attend. There’s also an ongoing Trinitarian Theology Consultation at ETS, which does Trinity programming every year. For this year when the annual theme coincided with our…

There’s an ancient rule for talking about the triune God’s action in the world: the outward works of the Trinity are undivided (opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt). It’s an important guideline that delivers you from thinking about three divine agents doing different things, which would be an odd thing for a monotheist to think. I wrote…

Today is the official release of the new book that Oliver Crisp and I edited, The Voice of God in the Text of Scripture: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Zondervan, 2016). This book contains selected papers from the 2016 Los Angeles Theology Conference of the same name. Katya Covrett and the team at Zondervan Academic have once…

Dr. Rodrick Durst (Gateway Seminary of the West) recently published Reordering the Trinity: Six Movements of God in the New Testament (Kregel: 2015). I’ve never seen anything quite like this book. The title Reordering the Trinity sounds edgy, like Durst is going to claim something wildly novel; maybe claim that the Father proceeds from the…

I have this snarky little footnote on page 73 of my book The Triune God, that goes like this: I considered dialing back the Cassandra tone of this passage, but I ended up leaving it as you see it here. Does it sound too world-weary, jaded, or dour? Maybe. But I am here to tell…

My book The Triune God (part of Zondervan’s New Studies in Dogmatics series) has an official release date of Dec 6, which is a few weeks after the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in mid-November. But here’s good news: Zondervan will have copies of The Triune God for sale at the conference. This…