Category: Theology

The last few years, I’ve been reading and writing on ecclesiology. It’s a funny topic, one capable of being at one moment dull, at the next incendiary. There’s plenty out there that merely re-hashes standard material and parses terms ever more finely. Here, though, are a few of my favorite reads – an idiosyncratic list,…

There’s a fun “favorite books” meme going around, and the bloggers at First Things’ Evangel blog made it look so fun that I decided to participate. Here is my contribution. Comments are turned on over there, in case you are interested in joining the conversation.

Today (March 17) Rudolf Ewald Stier (1800 – 1862) was born. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him, he is little noted nor much remembered these days. Partly because he was so awesome that our puny age cannot handle his sheer awesomeness. Stier did a lot of interesting things as a conservative Lutheran…

Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan coming to John, to be baptized by him. But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” But Jesus answering said to him, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting…

What if you could survey the entire scope of Christian doctrine at once: a brief enough summary to show the whole thing at a glance, but with enough detail to see the various parts and how they relate to each other? As a stand-alone experience, that wouldn’t be especially valuable: it would be too much…

Philippians is among the sweetest books of the New Testament. It is a short letter from Paul to a congregation that he obviously feels and expresses great affection toward. In 1898, JB Lightfoot, the Bishop of Durham, said that Philippians is “not only the noblest reflexion of St. Paul’s personal character and spiritual illumination, his…

There is a lot of material to cover in the doctrine of Scripture: everything from its deep background in God’s will to redeem us and reveal himself, to the “business end” of the doctrine in providing a user’s guide to the English Bible an ordinary believer holds in his or her hand. In between are…

I’m not sure what came over John Wesley, but one day he got positively excited about the idea of showing the organic, systematic structure of Christian faith. This kind of passion for understanding structural relationships was not his normal way of working: he was a preacher and a world-changer, not a theological ponderer or chart-maker.…

Here is a brief thought project prompted by several years of teaching the new members class at my home church (an Evangelical Free Church of America congregation that appeals to serious-minded conservatives). This is not the way I teach the subject in the class, but it is how I’ve been connecting some of the dots…