Category: Blog
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Personhood According to Pannenberg
Wolfhart Pannenberg is one of the most accomplished theologians of the twentieth century. His skill as a rigorous doctrinal thinker is well served by his mastery of historical materials on every Christian doctrine. Pannenberg’s first major publication was in 1963 (a multi-author set of essays entitled Revelation as History), and he completed a three-volume Systematic…
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The Advent of Good Will
By far my favorite story about the celebration of Christmas is the Christmas truce of 1914. On the night of December 24th, entrenched and fully engaged in deadly combat, German soldiers in Ypres began to observe Christmas festivities. They lit candles, decorated a tree, and began to sing carols. After a short while, the British troops…
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With the Current, Not Across It
I’ve stopped saying “Just before he ascended into heaven, Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission.” Here’s why: When I teach about the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20), I underline its importance by showing that these are the last words Jesus speaks at the end of the gospel of Matthew. I love to explore how ideas…
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The Classical Question of the Origin of Evil
At a recent panel discussion (ETS 2013 in Baltimore), I was asked to say a few things about John Wesley’s view of the origin of evil. The first thing I wanted to say is that Wesley thought of the origin of evil as a classical question. By calling the question of evil’s origin “classical,” I…
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Fittingness: How Conveniens
(From a paper I read at ETS 2013 in Baltimore, as part of a panel responding to “Hillbilly Thomist” Fritz Bauerschmidt’s new book on Thomas Aquinas.) The first helpful theological tool I found in Bauerschmidt’s version of Thomas Aquinas was an approach to teaching summed up in the motto contemplata aliis tradere. The second thing,…
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Contemplata Aliis Tradere: Aquinas according to Bauerschmidt
(From a paper I read at ETS 2013 in Baltimore, as part of a panel responding to “Hillbilly Thomist” Fritz Bauerschmidt’s new book on Thomas Aquinas.) The Oxford University Press series Christian Theology in Context promises to situate theologians in their cultures and histories, to “understand how theologies are themselves cultural products” and how theological…
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C.S. Lewis: on faces and how to get them
This morning, Fred Sanders and I participated in a chapel honoring C.S. Lewis’ life and works. Here’s a little reflection on a passage from Till We Have Faces: Be careful of the story you tell yourself. This is some of the best advice my husband has ever given me. And, as we listen to the…
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The Praise of Perelandra
Excerpt from a chapel on the stories of C.S. Lewis, at Biola on Dec. 2, 2013. I want to read to you a passage from the second book of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, from the book Perelandra. Though it’s from the final pages of the book, you don’t need any spoiler alert, and there’s no need…
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First Lines of Theology Books
Joan Didion once said that the first line of a book is the decisive part. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” Didion was talking…
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The Dazzling Dusk
There are a few lines from a poem by Coventry Patmore that stick in my mind for their remarkable, evocative power. I first read them in a 1939 anthology by Walter de la Mare called Behold This Dreamer, a rambling collection of prose and poetry about “Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the…
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God Went Bowling
There’s a little song called God Went Bowling by a band called the Swirling Eddies. It was on their 1994 album Zoom Daddy, and it features an oompah beat driven by accordion. Over it all is the snide vocal of Terry Scott Taylor, the songwriter whose mad genius has found outlet via at least three…
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Hiding A Few Words
When I published The Deep Things of God in 2010, I made a mental note to myself that I should eventually use this blog to let readers in on a fun little bit of extra information about the book. Then I lost the mental note somewhere on the mental desktop of my mental office. Now…