Category: Theology
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Fifty Love Songs to the Bible (G. Campbell Morgan’s Hymnal)
People claim to believe all kinds of things, but if you want to find out what they really believe, see what they can sing about. As I’ve tried to identify what the great evangelical tradition has believed about Scripture, I have found plenty of arguments, manifestos, controversies, and declarations. But I also found a hymnal…
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How Did Jesus Train?
Jesus lived and acted as a human being filled with the Holy Spirit in dependence on His Father’s leading. Throughout His incarnation, he voluntarily refrained from employing his divine nature (Philippians 2:5-11). He thereby becomes a real example for us to follow. Accordingly, Paul can say without blinking an eye, “Follow me as I follow…
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The Sense that Miracles Make
Miracles are all about getting attention. The miracles reported in the Bible are no exception, and are sometimes designated as signs and wonders, that is, pointers and shocks. The miracles that Jesus Christ did during his earthly ministry bear this twofold structure prominently: they startle and indicate; they shock and they point to something. What…
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Exhortation to the Students Upon Their Return to the University after the Vacation (Bishop Robert Leighton)
Summer is over and the students are icumen in. For all who are returning to campuses to take up again the sober business of learning, here is a little gem from the great evangelical bishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684). I publish it here without any extra comment, because I hardly know what to add to words…
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Life in the Fundamentalist Word (Philip Mauro)
It’s not news to anybody that the evangelical tradition has a high doctrine of Scripture, but a lot of contemporary evangelicals seem to have forgotten what originally generated this commitment to Scripture: the characteristic evangelical experience of God’s power and authority in the text of the Bible. In fact, one of the cherished affirmations of…
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“That God Himself May Through His Word Speak” (Adolph Saphir)
I know it disagrees with conventional wisdom, but I am persuaded that evangelical Christianity has always had a recognizable way of approaching the Bible, and that this approach has been tacitly trinitarian. To demonstrate this, I could cite a number of contemporary theologians who are proudly developing their accounts of Scripture in an increasingly trinitarian…
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Scripture as the Voice of the Triune God
Evangelical Christians are the most thoroughly trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by an applied trinitarian theology which took more seriously than ever before the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life. Nothing we as evangelicals do makes…
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How Did Jesus Act?: Jesus as a Moral Teacher
It has long been recognized that, irrespective of one’s religious views about Jesus of Nazareth, he is one of the world’s leading ethical thinkers and teachers. Indeed, as late as the second world war, most moral thinkers in the West—secular or not—did their best to show that their moral theories yielded results in keeping with…
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Eat the Word of God
About one year ago, I wrote an article here about an old-fashioned method of Bible study that delivers more power than most other kinds of Bible study I’ve tried. The basic idea is to focus on one book, and read it repeatedly (but there are some helpful details worth enumerating). A few months later, Joe…
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On Division in the Church
While his Christology leaves much to be desired, the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) has some great thoughts on ecclesiology. Consider the following: [T]here are frequently also efforts at union which do not originate in the Spirit of the Church, and the success of which cannot therefore be regarded as a gain,…