Category: Theology
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Praying on World AIDS Day
It’s World AIDS Day today. We tend to get faddish about issues. A buzz starts up about a particular need in the world, and many of us jump on a bandwagon of support, buying T-shirts and seeing movies and, sometimes, praying. Too often, our interest wanes as soon as the issue becomes ‘so last year.’…
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Why Did You Make Us Wander? Isaiah 63:17
This surely counts as a difficult verse in the Bible. In Isaiah 63:17, the prophet asks: O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart, so that we fear you not? Even in context, it’s a stark question to put to God. It seems to be a confession of…
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On the Difficulty of Being Thankful
We live in a plastic, disposable culture but to say that is merely to state the obvious. Many respond to this plasticity and disposability by becoming activists, either on the world stage or in their own communities and homes. Others have simply chosen to ignore this fact and to continue feeding the materialistic monster that…
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Christianity as a Knowledge Tradition
Last week I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. This post is an excerpt from a longer series I wrote some time back the content of which pertains, in part, to my recent ETS paper: In the first two installments of this series, I have sought to establish two…
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The Second Person, in Person
Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God. That means he is God the Son, and that, in turn, means that he is the second person of the Trinity which consists of first the Father, second the Son, and third the Spirit. The one God has always been tri-personal, but in the fullness of time,…
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Luther the Word-Wielder
Thank God for shorthand. Without it, the ready wit of Martin Luther would be lost to us. Some argue that Luther’s were the loose lips which sank the great ship; others hear him as a voice crying the wilderness who merely called a spade a spade. But he sure did have a way with words.…
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John Perkins: 5 Things to do if the Foundations Be Destroyed
Last Saturday, John M. Perkins spoke at the annual harvest banquet of the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Perkins is a living legend, and LABTS is a great old school “dedicated to the task of instructing Christian workers in the Word of God.” It seems that lots of churches are starting Bible Institutes and Ministry…
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Witnessing as a Spiritual Discipline
A Review of the Nature of Spiritual Disciplines In previous articles here on Scriptorium I have clarified the nature of a spiritual discipline and explained how spiritual disciplines, construed as training exercises analogous to those employed in getting good at golf, help to facilitate growth in the good life. I defined a Christian spiritual discipline…
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How He Worked for Christ: R.A. Torrey
Like all reasonable people everywhere, I always expected to be a super-hero when I grew up. I figured it was just a matter of time before my latent superpowers manifested themselves. But my sixteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. My eighteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. By that time, I would have settled…
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Faith is Nothing
Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else. It has what John Webster calls a ‘rhetoric of indication’, one which…
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Why Ephesians is the Greatest (Thomas Goodwin)
The puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679) wrote a breathtaking commentary on Ephesians: about a thousand dense pages that only cover up through chapter two, verse 11. Before launching into his exposition, Goodwin offers a few remarks about just how great the epistle to the Ephesians is. He quotes Jerome’s comment that Ephesians is “like the heart…