Author: Fred Sanders

Psalm 22, with good reason, has long been read by Christians as prophetic commentary on the death of Christ. Jesus cried out the first line of the Psalm, “My  God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” during the crucifixion itself. But the entire Psalm, not just the opening line, runs in mysterious parallel to…

WGT Shedd’s discussion of the Trinity in his Dogmatic Theology (Gomes edition, of course!) is vigorous and pointed. Shedd drops a few locutions odd and angular enough to blanch a scholastic. Try this one: “Divine nature energizes internally from eternity to eternity in two distinct manners….” But those are fairly rare, and are an acceptable byproduct…

More good stuff from HCG Moule’s Outlines of Chrisitan Doctrine. These bits are mainly on the incarnation, which cannot be considered except along with the atonement, for reasons on which Moule is luminously clear. Certain developments in nineteenth century theology had led to a kind of over-development of the doctrine of the incarnation, and Moule…

The discussion of personhood in James Ussher’s 1648 systematic theology (A Body of Divinity: The Sum and Substance of the Christian Religion) is brief, and interesting on several counts. Ussher divides the discussion into two parts: Persons in general, “and then what a Person in the Trinity is.” Along the way he picks up some…

Robert Saucy (1930-2015) taught systematic theology for 54 years at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology. If you doubled Bob’s length of service, you’d have the number 108, which is one year older than Biola itself. Bob began teaching at Talbot in 1961, when the graduate School of Theology was less than a decade old.…

Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus reads like a spiritual guidebook that crashed into a book of manners. If that doesn’t make sense to us, it might be because  we don’t see all of life’s domains jointed together, as Clement did. Virtue, for Clement, was precisely the application of right reason to every detail of conduct. One…

Fivescore and seven years ago, our founding fathers brought forth in Los Angeles a Bible Institute. Here’s the 30-minute talk I gave in Biola chapel on Feb 25, 2015, Biola’s 107th anniversary. If you don’t know the Biola story, this is a short intro. It’s a great story, stocked with millionaire oilmen, a globe-trotting evangelist,…

Someone recently asked me a question about John Wesley. The person who wrote to me had long found Wesley’s spirituality helpful and encouraging, but were troubled by something they had read: Somewhere they ran across a few lines from a letter John wrote to his brother Charles well into his sixties, saying “I don’t believe…

More good stuff from HCG Moule’s Outlines of Christian Doctrine. Moule read the 39 Articles as a straightforwardly Reformed document, and although he was calm and never feisty about his brand of Anglican Calvinism, it had solid edges. Here he is in his “why I am not an Arminian” mode, explaining what he found lacking…

H.C.G. Moule (1841-1920) was a great expositor who served as bishop of Durham for 19 years. I would be hard pressed to name my favorite book from among the many that he wrote, but there’s something special about the brief systematic theology he published in 1889 (revised edition by Hodder and Stoughton, 1902). It began as…

Something God has never been without is philanthropia, love of humanity, and this divine attribute was manifested in Christ. Here’s how Paul puts it in Titus 3:3-7: For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one…