Category: Theology

The first line of Psalm 102 asks God the same thing twice: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.” Or does it? Martin Luther, commenting on the psalm, takes the two requests as really distinct from each other: on the one hand there’s a prayer, and on the other hand…

If you’d like to take a class with me on the doctrine of the Trinity, you don’t have many options. I teach in a small program for undergrads only, and they get most of my teaching time. So my classroom presence is pretty limited to Torrey Honors students. [record scratch noise] UNTIL NOW! Zondervan has…

The breaking news part of this post is that Biola library’s Christian Comics Collection, already the deepest archive of its kind, has recently acquired a large set of comics by cartoonist Ernest James Pace (1880-1946). This is important because Pace was an early pioneer of Christian cartooning. By adding these Pace materials, the Biola archive…

My review of Carl Beckwith‘s 2016 book The Holy Trinity just appeared in the July 2017 issue of The International Journal of Systematic Theology. It is a fantastic book, and I wanted to blog about it briefly to help spread the word to folks who may not see the review in IJST. Beckwith’s Holy Trinity deserves…

The command to do good, and to be good, sounds very deep and powerful. It vibrates with all the seriousness of a divine voice of command. Whenever I see it turning the heads and hearts of young people, I regard it with a kind of veneration: what a miracle to see young people fall in…

Sometimes the doctrine of the Trinity is presented as if it is the solution to the problems that would surface in mere (unipersonal) monotheism. A merely unipersonal deity, it is said, could not be love, and therefore only on the grounds of Trinitarian revelation could the message that God is love be proclaimed. Or a…

Last summer (pretty much exactly one year ago) there was a mostly-online discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity in evangelical circles. It was a fast-moving, multi-platform scuffle on many fronts. There was a lot of heat, and also a lot of light, and several exceptionally good blog posts written. Here’s a good, linked bibliography.…

In 2006 I wrote an analysis of the movement known as Oneness Pentecostalism (sometimes called Apostolic or Jesus-Only), a form of non-Trinitarian teaching about Jesus. I wrote that article, and made it freely available on the web, because I consider Oneness teaching to be a serious error which I would like to protect the churches…

Everything you think you know about the Trinity is wrong. It’s been wrong for a long, long time; centuries, actually. But what I am about to tell you will set you straight once and for all. I will show you mysteries you have not known. And by the time I’m done, you will finally understand…

At the end of John’s Gospel, the risen Christ says to the disciples: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” It’s such a stark statement that, when I get to preach on this text, I usually spend about half the sermon explaining what Jesus didn’t mean by it. Our sending-out…

The Puritan Isaac Ambrose (1604-1664) wrote a large book called Looking Unto Jesus. If I call it a devotional book, you’ll simply need to upgrade your notion of what a devotional book could be, or the condition to which all devotional books should aspire. Ambrose wrote it with the design of placing the mind of…