Author: Fred Sanders

This Saturday there’s a great conference for men in Los Angeles. It’s organized by the Los Angeles Bible Training School, which I believe is the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles. The conference theme is “Behold Your God!” because all the teaching will be about the character and attributes of God.  Often, a conference for…

The first annual Los Angeles Theology Conference was a big success, and now we are moving forward with plans for future LATC meetings. Here are our topics for the next four years: 2014: Trinity 2015: Atonement 2016: Pneumatology 2017: Dogmatics I’ll announce more details about each of those themes in due course. But we can…

Here is the welcome note published in the conference program for today’s theology conference: Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Los Angeles Theology Conference, an annual gathering devoted to the discussion of major doctrines of systematic theology. Thank you for joining us in this first year, when we take up the central doctrine of christology. A theology conference…

I recently described how I read the Gospel of Matthew looking for an understanding of salvation: by keeping Paul in the back of my mind, but not letting him get in the front of my mind. I wasn’t claiming to be original, just describing and recommending the kind of Bible reading that I think is…

The Gospel of Matthew is a book about salvation. The author sets up the topic very clearly in the first chapter, in the section that provides the two names of Jesus. The angel says to Joseph (Matt 1:21) that Mary “will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save…

Next Thursday and Friday, Biola University will host the first annual  Los Angeles Theology Conference. There’s some bookish goodness going on at this event: All of the plenary lectures and a few of the parallel papers from the conference will be published within the year by Zondervan, in a volume bearing the same title as the…

Arius the Libyan: An Idyll of the Early Church (NY: Appleton, 1884) was a work of historical fiction that portrayed Arius as the real hero of the fourth century. To portray Arius as the good guy requires a complete re-imagining of what Christianity is all about, and that’s what Arius the Libyan attempted. Read my…

 Paul J. Griffith’s 2009 book Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar is a fascinating work. I’ve been reading it a little bit at a time over the past few months. When you’re reading a book that’s all about analyzing the desire to read and know things, you think twice about gobbling down chapter after chapter. So…

The vocabulary of Ephesians is is rich in “house” and “building” words. Most of them show up in a good English translation, but there are several more in the original Greek. At some points, Paul seems almost to be punning on “house” words, or Greek words made from the oik-  root. For example, a key…

In 1884 the Appleton publishing company in New York released an anonymous novel with the title Arius the Libyan.  Its titular main character is the fourth-century arch-heretic Arius, who is cast as a moral example, a spiritual giant, and a tireless fighter for the simple gospel of the primitive church versus the sinister schemes of…

(A sermon preached Sunday, Dec 30, 2012, at Tulare Evangelical Free Church, Tulare, California) We are gathered today to ordain Dr. Jason Sexton to Christian ministry. What language shall we borrow to describe this Christian ministry? We could use the word pastor, of course, meaning shepherd. That is a very biblical image, drawing our attention…