Category: Blog

As I celebrated the graduation of the Torrey Honors Institute class of 2013, I took some time to think back on significant times I had shared with them. I thought of the Christmas party at my house their freshman year and the camping trip their sophomore year, when we read the entire Divine Comedy around…

What would it take to lose your salvation? Sometimes I think the fact that we can pose that question in such a short sentence, with so few words, is part of the problem of talking about the question well. The brevity of the formulation (“Lose your salvation? Yes or no.”) lends itself to taking the…

In his remarkable book The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, Kendall Soulen pays very close attention to the way the revealed name of God (the Tetragrammaton) functions in the Bible and in Christian theology. If you’re reading the Old Testament in an English translation of the Bible, you’ll see the four-letter name of God…

In Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, Thomas brings his favorite Aristotelian categories to bear on book reviewing.  While explaining Boethius’ preface, Thomas says that Boethius “sets forth… the four causes of his work.” Those four causes are the famous four causes from Aristotle’s Physics, where the philosopher declares that “we do not have…

I got invited to preach on Trinity Sunday (May 26, 2013) at Redeemer Church of La Mirada, a church just down the road a bit,  where a lot of my friends and colleagues attend. The sermon is available for download at their website for the time being, and I’ll see if I can figure out…

For twelve years, the Torrey Honors Institute has organized the G. Campbell Morgan Theology Lectures, a ten-hour overview of the major doctrines of systematic theology. It’s designed for Torrey freshmen and sophomores who have been immersed in primary texts from the history of theology: Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and even a few authors whose names…

A prayer given at Torrey graduation, May 24, 2013. It includes a little unfootnoted Calvin, a little Barth, a little Lincoln, a little Psalm 98, and is based on a prayer I prayed ten years ago for another graduating class. O Sovereign God, your story is bigger than ours. We come to you today with…

The Los Angeles Bible Training School graduated another class of Bible students last week. These graduates have earned a Bible certificate that equips them to carry on their ministries with greater depth and more training, based on a systematic study of the Scriptures. The commencement speaker was Dr. Clint Arnold, dean of Talbot School of…

“Write prayers and burn them,” advised P.T. Forsyth in The Soul of Prayer.  Why write them? Because it gives you a chance to be more careful in choosing words, in shaping the overall prayer with craft and coherence. Most of the praying that we do throughout a work day is either unscripted and spontaneous, or…