Category: Blog

I just noticed an author using a technique for communicating very difficult subject matter, and I wanted to make a note of it. I’ve seen it employed in various kinds of writing, but my main interest in it is as a way of teaching theology. Here’s the example. It’s from Frederick Faber’s Bethlehem, a book-length…

Just a quick note here on the blog, to hold a link to a helpful sermon from Richard Chenevix Trench, “On the Duty of Hating Vain Thoughts.” It’s from an 1886 collection of sermons freely available at various places online, but I excerpted the sermon itself and am sharing it (along with my own highlighting)…

I almost missed this, because I wasn’t reading very closely in what I considered a mere devotional book by a forgotten author. I admit I don’t expect to be smacked with new insights from devotional reading. A few years ago I picked up a copy of William Hazer Wrighton’s book The Glory of His Grace:…

We recently finished our series of conversations on seventeenth-century theologian Amandus Polanus’ 18 Axioms on the Trinity. Now Ryan Hurd and I are going to have a few conversations with people who know a thing or two about Polanus, Protestant Scholasticism, trinitarian theology, and related issues. Partly this is just our idea of fun and…

The three persons of the Trinity coexist eternally, but not in the same way that other things coexist, mainly because these three are infinite, and not external to each other. And one of the Trinity, the eternal Son, took human nature into union with himself hypostatically, but this taking on of human nature did not…

Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the Trinity in the first part of his Summa Theologiae runs from question 27 to 43. It’s a vast discussion, all but comprehensive in its coverage of the most important elements of Trinitarian theology. So sweeping an account could start from any number of principles or points of view, but Thomas…

When speaking of the Trinity, you can say three, but you can’t say triple or threefold or triplex. And you certainly shouldn’t say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three beings. In these two axioms, Polanus is largely covering ground he has already covered early in the 18 Axioms, but he seems to…

I like this compact account of Trinitarian terminology in Vladimir Lossky’s Dogmatic Theology, 38-40. It’s especially good at showing the relation between the words ousia and hypostasis. Watch how Lossky relates the key terms to each other and uses them to draw out how they function in Trinitarian doctrine: The great problem of the fourth…

In trinitarian theology, the word “mission” is a precise and technical term. Though the word itself just means “sending,” a trinitarian mission is the external personal operation of one of the Trinity. It presupposes something very important, and that is an eternal relation of origin within the Trinity. The temporal mission extends or manifests that…