Category: Theology
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Love Reigns IN God, Not OVER Him
I’ve been meaning to write something about this, but every time I read this paragraph, I just want to keep quoting it rather than saying anything about it. So here, in his own words, is W. B. Pope on God’s love and the atonement: There is prevalent among professedly orthodox theologians a tendency to ascribe…
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Theology of First John
Courtesy of Open Biola, here is video of a lecture I gave in December 2013 for students at the Torrey Honors Institute. The title of the one-hour lecture is “The Theology of First John,” and while that accurately captures the main task, the lecture also spends a fair bit of time motivating and orienting readers…
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So Many Books at LATC 2014, Jan 16 & 17
In just a couple of weeks, Fuller Theological Seminary will be hosting the second annual Los Angeles Theology Conference: Advancing Trinitarian Theology. Oliver Crisp and I, along with Katya Covrett of Zondervan Academic, have planned this major event which is almost upon us. It’s on January 16 and 17, 2014. Register at the permanent home…
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"O Spare Me" for the New Year (W.B. Pope)
Should a Christian pray for a longer life on earth? Never mind admitting that that’s what you want; the question is whether you have any grounds for asking God to give you more years of this life. In 1869, Methodist theologian William Burt Pope published a sermon for the new year, on the last line…
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Personhood According to Pannenberg
Wolfhart Pannenberg is one of the most accomplished theologians of the twentieth century. His skill as a rigorous doctrinal thinker is well served by his mastery of historical materials on every Christian doctrine. Pannenberg’s first major publication was in 1963 (a multi-author set of essays entitled Revelation as History), and he completed a three-volume Systematic…
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With the Current, Not Across It
I’ve stopped saying “Just before he ascended into heaven, Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission.” Here’s why: When I teach about the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20), I underline its importance by showing that these are the last words Jesus speaks at the end of the gospel of Matthew. I love to explore how ideas…
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The Classical Question of the Origin of Evil
At a recent panel discussion (ETS 2013 in Baltimore), I was asked to say a few things about John Wesley’s view of the origin of evil. The first thing I wanted to say is that Wesley thought of the origin of evil as a classical question. By calling the question of evil’s origin “classical,” I…
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Fittingness: How Conveniens
(From a paper I read at ETS 2013 in Baltimore, as part of a panel responding to “Hillbilly Thomist” Fritz Bauerschmidt’s new book on Thomas Aquinas.) The first helpful theological tool I found in Bauerschmidt’s version of Thomas Aquinas was an approach to teaching summed up in the motto contemplata aliis tradere. The second thing,…
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Contemplata Aliis Tradere: Aquinas according to Bauerschmidt
(From a paper I read at ETS 2013 in Baltimore, as part of a panel responding to “Hillbilly Thomist” Fritz Bauerschmidt’s new book on Thomas Aquinas.) The Oxford University Press series Christian Theology in Context promises to situate theologians in their cultures and histories, to “understand how theologies are themselves cultural products” and how theological…
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The Praise of Perelandra
Excerpt from a chapel on the stories of C.S. Lewis, at Biola on Dec. 2, 2013. I want to read to you a passage from the second book of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, from the book Perelandra. Though it’s from the final pages of the book, you don’t need any spoiler alert, and there’s no need…
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First Lines of Theology Books
Joan Didion once said that the first line of a book is the decisive part. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” Didion was talking…
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God Went Bowling
There’s a little song called God Went Bowling by a band called the Swirling Eddies. It was on their 1994 album Zoom Daddy, and it features an oompah beat driven by accordion. Over it all is the snide vocal of Terry Scott Taylor, the songwriter whose mad genius has found outlet via at least three…