Category: Theology

Augustine’s Confessons is a uniquely rich book, so deeply felt and so carefully constructed that it beggars description. It exhausts the critical resources of centuries of commentators, and keeps on drawing new admirers who find new things there. Most well-constructed books have one central section, whether it comes early or late, whether it’s a turning-point,…

Several years ago, I headed up a project that put ten years of the old Biola journal The King’s Business online. That means that anybody interested in Biola’s early history (1910-1920), or conservative Protestantism, or California religion, can read these otherwise hard to find issues firsthand. The site has been down for a while, but…

As an Anglican, what drew me to this book was Davis’ subtitle: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence. I imagined that the book must be about the Eucharist (and it is) but as it turns out, it is so much more. The book is a kind of tour de force – a primer on pre-modern,…

My favorite fifth grader recently read the classic book Where the Red Fern Grows, and had the homework assignment of writing a letter to the main character, consoling him for the death of his beloved hound. (Oh, by the way, retroactive spoiler alert there; my bad.) The first draft said something like this: Dear Billy,…

In a class on Matthew’s gospel, my students are learning how to hear the voice of Matthew the evangelist, to understand how he structures his arguments, how he tells his stories, and what his particular theological concerns are as he reports the words and actions of Jesus. After the initial rush of excitement about how…

Talbot School of Theology recently launched a faculty team blog called The Good Book Blog. It’s a well-designed site with more than thirty contributors. That list includes a few Big Important Names, accomplished scholars you didn’t think would ever condescend to appear in the tohuwabohu of the blogosphere. It also includes some profs whose names…

When I’m asked what I teach or what my area of expertise is, I am often unsure of how to respond. I have a Ph.D. in theology but I focused on the medieval period. I teach in a great books program that includes texts in philosophy, theology, history, literature, etc. I often write books and…

The Gospel According to Matthew is intricately structured. A simple outline can capture the basic shape of the book well enough to assist a good reading, but a little more attention shows that this book has several layers of order, all helpful. Consider some of the layers of organization in Matthew, starting with the simplest…

The New Testament gives two different accounts of what happened when Paul and Silas preached the gospel in Thessalonica. One tells the external events, but the other gives the spiritual and theological meaning. Acts 17 has a fairly brief report (sandwiched in between the longer reports on the work in Philippi and Athens): Paul went…

I have argued that “evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church.” It’s a cheeky thing to say (the review in Christianity Today called the claim “a strong one, but… not capricious”), I suppose, since it doesn’t map onto current evangelical self-understanding. But I tried to…

In the current (Winter 2011) issue of Biola Magazine, I’ve got a brief article that describes the Biblical case for the doctrine of the Trinity. Here’s the intro: The Trinity is a biblical doctrine, but let’s admit it: There’s something annoying about how hard it is to put your finger on a verse that states…