Category: Blog
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Torrey Cambridge 2017: Great Booklist in a Great Place
Every July, about forty students and three professors from the Torrey Honors Institute take a trip to Cambridge for an intensive four-unit class. It’s Torrey Cambridge, and it’s a blast. The curriculum each summer is anchored in a short book of the New Testament, and includes about ten books by authors with a Cambridge connection:…
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When Bad Books do Good Things
It was while he was a student at Yale that R.A. Torrey (1856-1928) became a Christian. He describes it as a time when he was “leading a very reckless life” which involved, among other things, drinking heavily as a seventeen-year-old college kid. By his own testimony, he was driven to the brink of suicide, and…
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Teaching the Trinity in Haiti
In January 2017 I got to teach about the Trinity at a Bible Institute in Haiti. I did it in partnership with More Than Bread, a ministry committed to training Haitian pastors with biblical and theological knowledge. In a developing country with obvious hardships and material needs, there are a lot of Christian missions doing charitable…
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Pro-Nicene Theology (Free E-Book)
Short story: here’s a free theology book to download. Long story: In late 2016, Mike Allen and Scott Swain edited a blog series at Zondervan’s Common Places devoted to Pro-Nicene Theology. Pro-Nicene theology is trinitarianism, of course, but it’s not just the doctrine of the Trinity narrowly considered. To talk about pro-Nicene theology is to draw…
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God’s Omniscience as Law and Gospel (Sermon)
Earlier this month I got to preach in a chapel service at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology. I preached from Psalm 139 about divine omniscience, which has been much on my mind for the last few months. God knows everything about us, and the Bible talks about his knowledge not as some static catalog of…
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Make Good People Wish It Were True (Pascal)
After 9 hours of discussing Pascal’s Pensées with juniors in the Torrey Honors Institute this week, I feel (yes, in my heart, which knows many things reason cannot know) that he is a subtle author indeed. His fragmentary apologetic for the Christian religion, though in form it’s really just a pile of notes and mini-essays that he…
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Was Revealed, Is Revealed
Once upon a time, the triune God revealed the triunity of God. Before that time, God was triune but wasn’t saying so. Maybe there were hints and undertones here and there in the ways and words of the triune God throughout the Old Testament, but nothing you could call definitive disclosure. God is good at…
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Christmas is a Time for Family
Like most people I know, I have some very special Christmas memories, and many of them revolve around presents: the treasure-hunt gift that culminated in my first basketball, wrapped and hidden in a garbage can, or the tiny little present hidden on the tree itself that proved to be the pin for a set of…
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Absolute and Relative Regarding God
This post is just me preemptively sorting out some terminological confusion in academic trinitarian theology, so if you read it and then find yourself asking, “who cares?” you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The answer is, “seven people care.” So if you’re one of those seven, lean in here and looky, because this is…
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Angels Speaking Creation Maybe
So I was in church and we were singing that nineteenth-century hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” and that one line “you who sang creation’s story now proclaim Messiah’s birth” got me thinking about how I’ve sometimes wondered who the implied speaker is in Genesis 1, because just saying “Moses” doesn’t account for the…
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The Triune God: Book Release Today
Today is the official release date of my book, The Triune God, in Zondervan’s ambitious New Studies in Dogmatics series edited by Allen and Swain. Its cover has a nice, minty green color that will look good under your favorite theologian’s Christmas tree. Put a little red bow on it and you’ve got a party. Amazon…
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Gift and Giver
In The Dialogue of Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), she describes how God deals with the widespread human tendency to take good things from God and then forget him. “Those whose love is imperfect,” she reports God as saying, “who love me for my gifts and not for myself the giver, can be and often are…