Category: Blog

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is demonstrably a trinitarian, but he felt a tremendous tension over the doctrine. In his time there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was truly scriptural (for a blow-by-blow account of trinitarian fights in English in the seventeenth century, see Philip Dixon’s book Nice and Hot Disputes). Watts was…

Midrash Tehillim, the set of medieval rabbinic comments on the Psalms, sometimes delivers powerful and illuminating insights into the Psalms. Other times, it delivers powerful and illuminating insights into something else altogether –other parts of scripture, apparently unrelated except maybe by one verbal parallel. The rabbis knew how to do commentary on literal meaning, but…

John Bunyan (1628-1688) believed in the Trinity, and referred to the doctrine throughout his writings. But he devoted only one extended meditation to it, a piece entitled “Of the TRINITY and a CHRISTIAN,” whose title suggests an interest in something practical and perhaps edifying. The descriptive sub-title specifies that it is about “How a young…

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was never persuaded that the doctrine of the Trinity had anything to do with the gospel. It is common enough to blame Schleiermacher for his role in marginalizing the doctrine of the Trinity: He famously placed the doctrine at the very end of his work The Christian Faith, making it something of…

I keep hearing that “Protestants” are by definition people who “protest,” that is, people defined by their disagreement with something, their dissent, their rejection of something. It is, in other words, considered a term of negation. Now, I don’t make much of this, but it seems to me like a bit of bogus etymology. “Protest”…

A theological performance well worth the price of admission is watching the mature Karl Barth (1886-1968), trying to sort out the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, or the relative continuity and discontinuity between the covenants. In Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, in par. 69, the sub-section on Jesus as “the light of life,”…

Adolphe Monod (1802 – 1856), delivered a sermon on the Trinity from his sickbed as he came within the month of his death. His text was Romans 8:12-17, and two most arresting paragraphs for me are these: Holy Scripture is wise, even in its silence. You would look in vain therein for the word Trinity,…

Here is something which I suspect I have said before. But when John Henry Newman (1801-1890) says something, it always sounds a lot better than when anybody else says it. I found it on the last page of Andrew Louth’s odd little book Discerning the Mystery (1983), and Louth’s footnote places it in Newman’s Sermons,…

Baptist theologian John Gill (1697 – 1771), in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity, has an especially clear presentation of human salvation as grounded in the eternal God. This is a topic I have been trying to learn more about by studying Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679), but right now I find that Goodwin’s writing gives off too…

Claude Beaufort Moss (whose birth and death dates I cannot find) was a 20th-century Anglican theologian whose textbook, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, has been frequently reprinted. I’m nominating this book for Worst Opening Sentences Of A Systematic Theology Book Ever. Here he goes: What is Theology? It is the science of…

Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: “Yahweh is my light,” but then extended differently: “and my salvation… my strength.” The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King…