Category: Theology

I’m so glad to see this new book by Matt Anderson: The End of Our Exploring: A Book About Questioning and the Confidence of Faith. Anderson may be most in his element as a frontline blogger, elevating the discourse in his corner of the internet with astute writing and exceptional judgement about which topics to…

Last week my family got to spend a few days in Yosemite, artfully dodging the summer crowds and hiking as hard as a clan of young not-especially-hikers can. It was great. Along with the Bible and the writings of John Muir, I took along a little Karl Barth: not one of his big half-dome tomes,…

John Wesley is an author we go out of our way to read In the Torrey Honors Institute’s great books sequence. In most great books curricula, you wouldn’t likely find Wesley’s name ranked alongside Homer, Plato, Augustine, and Dante, but because of our evangelical identity at Biola, it is crucial that we interact with the…

The back pages of the June 2013 issue of JETS contain some very helpful book reviews. As usual, reviewers alerted me to a couple of books I need to read, and tipped me off to a number of books I should definitely skip. In some cases, just reading the review was enough to fill me in on…

On page one of his 1996 book Christian Faith & the Theological Life, Dominican Romanus Cessario makes a distinction. “To acquire knowledge about God is one thing; to commit oneself to him is another.” The two ought to be related, one would hope:  it’s hard to say which spectacle is more sorry, a person who…

My new book, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love (Crossway, 2013) is scheduled for August release, and is already available for pre-order (hint, hint). The book has received generous recommendations and endorsements from  a number of scholars who I sent the final draft to.  Of course I can’t help feeling gratified when…

Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford: OUP, 2012) (review copy courtesy of OUP) This is my kind of radical thesis–that that most exotic of Christian writers, Dionysius the Areopagite, is really, deep-down, Pauline. What makes things better is that the one putting forth the thesis, Harvard’s Charles Stang, knows what he’s…

(For the sermon that this is an excerpt from, go here.) God has spoken so well in Christ that even the silence around his word is eloquent, informative, communicative. We can learn from that silence in many ways, but here is one way: Because of what God has definitively said, we know there are certain…

(For the sermon that this is an excerpt from, go here.) God communicates. He speaks loudly sometimes, taking solemn oaths. He hints sometimes, giving us just enough information to draw us in. But what about God’s silence? What about the silent parts all mixed in with what he says? We want to learn to hear…

(For the sermon that this is an excerpt from, go here.) The book of Hebrews is a work that trains us to hear the voice of God when we read Scripture. And it not only trains us to hear God’s voice, it trains us to focus especially on what God himself emphasizes, and one way…