Category: Blog
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Call for Papers: LATC 2016, The Voice of God in the Text of Scripture
Starting today and running through July 17 there is an open call for papers for the 2016 Los Angeles Theology Conference. The conference this year (to be held in mid January at Fuller Seminary) has the title “The Voice of God in the Text of Scripture,” and our plenary speakers will be William Abraham, John…
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The Whole Trinity Worked the Incarnation of the Son
“The external works of the Trinity are undivided,” says a classic principle of trinitarian theology. Whatever God does outside of the divine essence, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do as the one divine causal agent. This is great news for monotheism, because if three distinct divine agents were bringing about created effects by distinguishable…
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Christ’s Death and the Fate of Western Lowland Gorillas
Paul Fryer’s striking art installation is a beautiful and realistic work… of a crucified gorilla. At first one might think his “Privilege of Dominion” is little more than a parody of the Christian faith, a repetition of ancient graffiti portraying Christ crucified with the head of a donkey. And in fact there has been some…
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Things Eternal: Sonship, Generation, Generatedness
There are several different things going on at the same time in the new book One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, (Crossway, 2015) edited by Bruce Ware and John Starke. It’s got a lot going on just because it’s a set of eleven essays by professors in…
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Favorite Pastorals Commentaries
I’m cleaning off my desk from another semester of teaching at Los Angeles Bible Training School (the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles), putting some books back on the shelf and returning others to the library. Here are some quick thoughts on the commentaries that proved most helpful to me this semester. Don’t confuse this…
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Watch “The Cost of Freedom”
The video for “The Cost of Freedom” event is now available. Cornel West and Robert George joined Rick Warren at Biola University for a discussion about disagreement, common ground, and justice. West and George are good friends, yet disagree on important issues. There is a lively discussion about halfway through as George talks about prudence and…
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Meet R. A. Torrey through his Sermons
Moody Publishers has just released my book How God Used R. A. Torrey: A Short Biography as Told Through His Sermons. Check out the keen cover design. It’s a very affordable paperback, and the digital edition is also nicely done. How God Used R.A. Torrey gathers 13 of his greatest sermons, according to me. About ten…
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In Defense of ‘Ramona’ and Other Children’s Classics
I teach classics for a living. As a result, my kids overhear conversations and snippets of conversations about Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and a host of others. But that’s not all they hear, for as someone devoted to the classics, I share this love with them in a steady diet of children’s classics by Beverly Cleary,…
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The Cost of Freedom – Robert George, Cornel West, and Rick Warren
April 30, 2015 7:30 pm Biola University Buy tickets or register for the livestream. How can societies preserve freedom for all people when we are beset by serious and substantial disagreements over what shape freedom should take? What kinds of virtues do we need as a people to preserve the common good? What kinds of…
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Biola–An Inoculation Against Intellectual Engagement?
In a recent book (following C.S. Lewis, we might call it the “Green Book”), the acknowledgments read as follows: “Ignoring the guidance of my fundamentalist Christian community by making Karl Barth the focus of my doctoral studies was one of the most pivotal decisions of my young adult life. After being inoculated to intellectual engagement…
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The Fullness That is in Christ, and Our Fullness in Him
We begin today the study of another of Paul’s wonderful letters to the churches. It was written at about the same time as the letter to the Ephesians and send by the same messenger, Tychicus (ch. 4:7, cf. Eph 6:21). It contains many of the same truths that are contained in the letter to the…
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“Behold, This Dreamer Cometh:” Joseph Typology
“It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus,” mused Peter Leithart recently, and I have to agree. It sure seems so! Leithart went on, in his post, to describe the kind of mental abstraction required to read the Joseph story that way; a “Proppian structural move…