In a sermon on Matt 3:17 (“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased”), Ralph Erskine (1685–1752) expounds the thesis that “God was in Christ.” The main thrust of the sermon is that there is a great difference between how God can be

Here is a great-books style argument for the unity of Genesis, from Robert Candlish’s 1868 book on Genesis. It turns on a comparison of Moses and Homer, but is mainly a matter of aesthetic perception of literary unity. Moses, as it seems to me, has

Thomas Adams (1583–1653) was a famous preacher, and no wonder. His sermons are so full of ideas and fresh expressions that they fill the mind to bursting. What follows are just some notes I took on a few pages of one sermon. The sermon is

In the first couple of pages of Paul Blowers’ fine book Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety, he explains something important about his subject. Reading early Christian theologians on the subject of creation, we find them doing

Today’s the release date for Matthew Barrett’s book, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Baker). Here’s the Amazon link, but do yourself a favor and look at the book’s home page on Baker Publishing’s site. I’m not necessarily saying there’s a 40-page excerpt pdf available

In theological anthropology, some of the best witnesses to the nature of true humanity are those traditions which were forced to refute, in doctrine and in practice, the motivated denial of their own humanity. When African-American Christians, for example, found their footing and secured the

I’ve been thinking about the doctrine of divine blessedness for several years, and in late February I got to gather my reflections on the subject for the 2019 Kistemaker Academic Lectures at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Here’s the slightly modified summary text about the

My good friend Matthew Owen is a philosopher with a lively interest in theology. Some time ago he invited me to co-edit with him a theme issue of the journal Theologica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology. Matt and I have talked a

I messed up footnote number eight on page 27 of my 2016 book The Triune God. It’s a little more interesting than it sounds. In that section, I’m describing how the structure of trinitarian theology is like the structure of praise: In the form of

The main point of Jean-Baptiste Chautard’s Soul of the Apostolate is that if you want to live an active life of Christian service, you need to attend seriously to your spiritual formation and relationship with God. (He says it in more 19th-century Trappist style, which

In First Timothy 1:11, Paul speaks of “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.” There was a nineteenth-century pastor named William Knibb who paraphrased this passage as “the gospel of the happy God,” and, as Charles Spurgeon said in his own sermon on the

In a couple of recent posts about Tim Pawl’s In Defense of Conciliar Christology, I began with some reflections on why it might be meaningful to speak of a single Christology of the early church. I thought I should also declare some of my own