Category: Blog

Way back in 1921, Karl Barth taught a course on Ephesians. The lectures from that course have finally been published in English, and while they have some of the defects that are to be expected from a lecture script that the author never revised for publication, they do not disappoint. This short book records a…

It’s possible I’m the only systematic theologian in the world who was a big fan of Markus Barth before I even knew Karl Barth existed. True story, and it’s because of Ephesians. I got saved in high school and then went to a state university to study drawing. I was more or less on my…

The title caught my eye: “Processions, Human and Divine.” I am very (very!) interested in divine processions: the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Knowledge of these two processions is knowledge of the Trinity. But what are these “human processions?” My interest piqued, I grabbed the January 1951 issue…

Adam Johnson’s T&T Clark Companion to Atonement has just dropped like the hundred-plus chapter, hundred-plus dollar behemoth that it is. More on that later. For now I’m just posting an excerpt from the chapter I wrote for it, entitled “These Three Atone: Trinity and Atonement.” It’s the first chapter in the volume after the editor’s…

What I love in theology is the big picture, the long lines of continuity. Whenever I read, I’m always looking for the unifying perspective that arises when a theologian finds an angle from which to behold the overarching unity that lets all the details settle into place. What I dread most in theology (second only…

The first line of Psalm 102 asks God the same thing twice: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.” Or does it? Martin Luther, commenting on the psalm, takes the two requests as really distinct from each other: on the one hand there’s a prayer, and on the other hand…

If you’d like to take a class with me on the doctrine of the Trinity, you don’t have many options. I teach in a small program for undergrads only, and they get most of my teaching time. So my classroom presence is pretty limited to Torrey Honors students. [record scratch noise] UNTIL NOW! Zondervan has…

The breaking news part of this post is that Biola library’s Christian Comics Collection, already the deepest archive of its kind, has recently acquired a large set of comics by cartoonist Ernest James Pace (1880-1946). This is important because Pace was an early pioneer of Christian cartooning. By adding these Pace materials, the Biola archive…

My review of Carl Beckwith‘s 2016 book The Holy Trinity just appeared in the July 2017 issue of The International Journal of Systematic Theology. It is a fantastic book, and I wanted to blog about it briefly to help spread the word to folks who may not see the review in IJST. Beckwith’s Holy Trinity deserves…

The command to do good, and to be good, sounds very deep and powerful. It vibrates with all the seriousness of a divine voice of command. Whenever I see it turning the heads and hearts of young people, I regard it with a kind of veneration: what a miracle to see young people fall in…