Category: Theology

The release date for the movie version of The Shack was March 3. That morning (not having seen the film yet) I was the guest in Biola’s interview-format chapel session called The Biola Hour (the name is a callback to the school’s great radio heritage). Mike Ahn and I talked about one aspect of the…

Late in 2016 I wrote a blog post on divine simplicity for the Pro-Nicene Theology series at Zondervan Academics’ Common Places blog (now available as part of a free mini-e-book). My goal was to show the biblical support for the doctrine of divine simplicity (simplicity was much on my mind, and I also wrote on the…

In January 2017 I got to teach about the Trinity at a Bible Institute in Haiti. I did it in partnership with More Than Bread, a ministry committed to training Haitian pastors with biblical and theological knowledge. In a developing country with obvious hardships and material needs, there are a lot of Christian missions doing charitable…

Short story: here’s a free theology book to download. Long story: In late 2016, Mike Allen and Scott Swain edited a blog series at Zondervan’s Common Places devoted to Pro-Nicene Theology. Pro-Nicene theology is trinitarianism, of course, but it’s not just the doctrine of the Trinity narrowly considered. To talk about pro-Nicene theology is to draw…

Earlier this month I got to preach in a chapel service at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology. I preached from Psalm 139 about divine omniscience, which has been much on my mind for the last few months. God knows everything about us, and the Bible talks about his knowledge not as some static catalog of…

After 9 hours of discussing Pascal’s Pensées with juniors in the Torrey Honors Institute this week, I feel (yes, in my heart, which knows many things reason cannot know) that he is a subtle author indeed. His fragmentary apologetic for the Christian religion, though in form it’s really just a pile of notes and mini-essays that he…

Once upon a time, the triune God revealed the triunity of God. Before that time, God was triune but wasn’t saying so. Maybe there were hints and undertones here and there in the ways and words of the triune God throughout the Old Testament, but nothing you could call definitive disclosure. God is good at…

This post is just me preemptively sorting out some terminological confusion in academic trinitarian theology, so if you read it and then find yourself asking, “who cares?” you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The answer is, “seven people care.” So if you’re one of those seven, lean in here and looky, because this is…

So I was in church and we were singing that nineteenth-century hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” and that one line “you who sang creation’s story now proclaim Messiah’s birth” got me thinking about how I’ve sometimes wondered who the implied speaker is in Genesis 1, because just saying “Moses” doesn’t account for the…

Today is the official release date of my book, The Triune God, in Zondervan’s ambitious New Studies in Dogmatics series edited by Allen and Swain. Its cover has a nice, minty green color that will look good under your favorite theologian’s Christmas tree. Put a little red bow on it and you’ve got a party. Amazon…