Category: Blog

You have to really care about a book if you set out to translate it for the very purpose of arguing against it. There’s just no way to make a decent translation without getting your hands dirty, your mind filled with the original text, your own vocabulary relativized by an alternative system, and your attention…

If I baptize you, but I’m just kidding, are you baptized? What if both of us are children? What if it’s fake church for fun? What if I grow up and become a famous bishop? Medievalist Marcia Colish has spent a lot of time thinking about a wide range of marginal baptismal situations. She wrote…

In brief presentations of the doctrine of the Trinity, we can observe two different styles. On the one hand is a kind of genetic style, which introduces the three persons in a salvation-historical framework, leading off with the Father, then adding the Son, and then (after a brief historical account of the work of the…

To speak accurately about the triune God, theology has to indicate that he is high and lifted up, inhabits eternity, and has Holy as a name; yet simultaneously to indicate that he is intimately present with the contrite and lowly. His eyes are too pure to look on evil, yet he girds his loins and…

First John is a fantastic mess of looping, swirling statements with little pointer-words just pointing all over the place. The pronouns are especially peculiar. One scholar (Von Wahlde) has said that “determining the antecedents of pronouns in the First Letter of John is a notorious problem for commentators.” In his 2012 book Affirming the Resurrection…

A guest post from a shrewd observer of current events: It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing—even of a worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing—if we do not take good care of them. How many worthy words have already died under our very eyes, because…

Here‘s a podcast organized by Fred Zaspel at Books at a Glance, in which he asks four theologians about recent controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity. The four theologians are Mike Ovey, Scott Swain, Steve Wellum, and me. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, which you’ll probably appreciate more if you’ve…

The Spring 2016 issue of Biola’s Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care has a brief tribute to Robert Mulholland, who died in December 2015. Editor Steve Porter puts Mulholland on the “short list of the founders of the spiritual formation movement.” I’m an editorial consultant for JSFSC and knew Mulholland at Asbury Seminary, so…

The June 2016 wave of Trinity discussion online has produced some really rich essays. Just off the top of my head, with apologies for slighting anybody, the posts by Darren Sumner, Matthew Barrett, and Matt Emerson have been a feast. I know it was controversy that summoned these theologians to crawl out of their offices and…

We are nearing the close of the Call for Papers period for the 2017 Los Angeles Theology Conference. The conference topic is “The Task of Dogmatics,” and we are looking for nine papers to add to the scheduled plenary presentations. A great LATC paper is a brief, constructive theological argument. We want papers that rise…