Category: Blog
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Thoughts on the “Benedict Option” – A Lament
For years Rod Dreher (senior editor at The American Conservative) has been writing about his “Benedict Option.” Now his book of the same title has finally appeared. To be honest, I have not been convinced by his articles addressing the Benedict Option and his book fails to convince me too. James K. A. Smith published…
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New Essay, New Word
The new issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society is out, and it’s got plenty of Trinitarian theology in it. Don’t miss Scott Swain’s article on the Bible and the Trinity, and Gerald McDermott’s piece on the Trinity and world religions. It’s also got my article “Evangelical Trinitarianism and the Unity of the…
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Grashop’s Bible Chart
I just came across this fascinating chart by T. Grashop. It’s printed in the front of the Geneva Bible, and it diagrams, using a tree of subdivisions, the way to read the Bible. There are seven steps, and they start as far back as “earnestly…pray unto God” that he will teach you, give you understanding,…
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Deep Things of God, Second Edition
My 2010 book The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, is coming out in a second edition in April 2017. Why? Because while the first edition has found a home in classrooms as well as churches, it contained a few obstacles that made it less useful than it could have been in…
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Retrieving Eternal Generation
Scott Swain and I recently turned in the manuscript for a book called Retrieving Eternal Generation. It’s a collection of fifteen essays that we hope will go a long way toward securing Trinitarian theology’s classic form for contemporary theological work. The last few decades have seen a lot of loose talk about the doctrine of…
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The Distinct God of the Book of Job
Robert Sokolowski has said that The Christian God is presented as being so transcendent to the world that he could be, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world were not. The Christian God can be distinguished from the world in this radical way. … In contrast, the gods of pagan religion and the…
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No More Theology Journals (Troeltsch 1900)
Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) was an influential German theologian, whose life project was to work out the logic of the historical sciences in the sphere of Christianity and culture. In his own theological work, he did not think that a thorough historicism would leave any room at all for normative doctrinal claims from Christian doctrine (“The…
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Divine Affections Yes; Divine Passions No
Does God have emotions? Anybody who reads the Bible certainly finds God declaring himself to be full of love, full of anger, and many other things besides. So the answer seems obvious: Emotional God. But as soon as you say it, it sounds odd and you catch yourself thinking it can’t be quite that simple.…
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Chapel in the Gym on the Shack in the Theater
The release date for the movie version of The Shack was March 3. That morning (not having seen the film yet) I was the guest in Biola’s interview-format chapel session called The Biola Hour (the name is a callback to the school’s great radio heritage). Mike Ahn and I talked about one aspect of the…
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How to Read TWO Books (Erasmus Addlepate)
File this under “weird books I have encountered.” Erasmus Addlepate’s 1940 How to Read Two Books: It’s obviously a spoof of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. You can tell from Addlepate’s supposed other books like How to Get Up int he Morning that he’s mocking the “Let me tell you how this is…
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How to Use a Book Instead of Receiving It
In his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis describes the difference between reading a book to encounter what is in it, and using a book for other reasons. There are lots of other reasons to use a book, some petty and some profound, but the point Lewis is making is that using is…
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Deeper Simplicity (Dialogue with Dolezal)
Late in 2016 I wrote a blog post on divine simplicity for the Pro-Nicene Theology series at Zondervan Academics’ Common Places blog (now available as part of a free mini-e-book). My goal was to show the biblical support for the doctrine of divine simplicity (simplicity was much on my mind, and I also wrote on the…