Category: Blog

“He whose biography is now before us, is himself with us.” This principle is explained and applied by Scottish theologian Hugh Martin (1822-1885) in his 1860 book Christ’s Presence in the Gospel Narrative (republished as The Abiding Presence). The key idea is that we have two factors to reckon with when we read the life…

Daniel Treier’s new (third) edition of The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology has just been published, and it’s a marvel. A big hardcover weighing in at just under 1,000 pages, it is a wisely-planned compendium of theology and spiritual life from an evangelical perspective. Every time I try to shelve it near my desk as a handy…

The book I co-edited, Retrieving Eternal Generation, is releasing this month, and a few people have asked me about the cover. The beautiful, beautiful cover. There are a few reasons this cover features golden stars on a blue background. One is that I saw an opportunity to make people look at mosaics from Ravenna, and that…

In Book 1 of Nicholas Cabasilas’ classic The Life in Christ, he sings the praises of salvation at such a high pitch that you think he’s likely at any moment to say some things that only make sense as ecstatic speech rather than as good theology. “They are no trifling gifts that God bestows,” says…

My review of Anthony Thiselton’s Shorter Guide to the Holy Spirit is out in the new issue of Theology Today. Here’s the most substantive paragraph from the review, which picks out an important contribution Thiselton makes: There are a few theses running through all this material. One of the most important is that we should unlearn…

In mid-January of 2018, Fuller Theological Seminary is hosting the sixth annual Los Angeles Theology Conference. The topic is theological anthropology: The Christian Doctrine of Humanity. As usual, I’m offering a class at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology in conjunction with LATC. The two-day conference itself provides a big chunk of contact hours to build…

The Father sent the Son to save sinners. The main thing that should make us think of is, of course, the incarnation, in which the Son of God took human nature into personal union with himself and lived out divine sonship in the stuff of earth: as Jesus Christ, born of Mary, entangled in social…

I’m teaching a class session on Martin Luther’s amazing treatise “On the Last Words of David,” which is Luther’s most satisfying exposition of Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible. It really is a handbook of principles on how to interpret Scripture in Trinitarian fashion: how to find the Trinity in the Old Testament, how to understand the…

Theologian Robert W. Jenson died this week, after a very productive life of writing theology. His contributions to the field are numerous and wide-ranging, and yet his life-work had a remarkable coherence and focus. There’s an identifiable set of Jenson proposals out there to be dealt with by serious theologians. As he himself said, “it…

I’m teaching Ephesians this semester at the Los Angeles Bible Training School, which I continue to call the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles. Well over a half century of urban ministry centered on the Bible, and the courses are free. Whenever possible in any context, I teach the Bible using the immersion method, roughly…