Category: Theology
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A Smattering of Greek is Worse than None at All
Do you think it is wise for a man who is a pastor in charge of a church to study Greek? Do you think the practical help that would be derived from it would compensate for the valuable time spent upon it when there are so many other important things to do? I most certainly…
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Who Told You God is Love?
How is it that an all-wise and all-loving God could create mankind with a foreknowledge that so many would be doomed to eternal punishment? Finite beings are always getting on perilous ground when they begin to ask how an infinite God could do this or that. An infinitely wise God may have a thousand good…
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Corrie ten Boom was Born and Died Today
Cornelia ten Boom was born on April 15, 1892, and died on her ninety-first birthday, April 15, 1983. Corrie was from a remarkable family of pious Dutch Christians who constructed a secret room in their home and housed a number of Jews there, hidden from the Nazis. When their secret activities were discovered, the whole…
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What Sanctification Is
What is sanctification? How is it obtained? What does it do for you? Here we have three questions in one and pretty large questions to answer briefly. The questions are answered at length and fully in my book. WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES in the chapter on Sanctification. To answer briefly, to sanctify means to separate…
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Karl Barth Sinks With The Titanic
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg. In the early hours of the next morning the great ship sank, and everybody was talking about it. Pastors were talking about it. One pastor, in Safenwil, Switzerland, said to his congregation, “I would like to encourage you to reflect on it.” He was the 26-year…
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He is Risen!
Christ is risen! This is the day for which we’ve been waiting these long Lenten weeks. We have been fasting and praying and lamenting, thinking so much–many of us would say far too much–about our sin and suffering and death. We entered into Lent with a certain somber joy, but that often lapsed into boredom…
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The Living One, Alive with Divine Life
John Webster on the meaning of the resurrection: “Jesus Christ lives. Whatever further claims may be made about the resurrection of Jesus, and whatever consequences it may be necessary to draw from the primitive Christian confession that ‘God raised him from the dead’ (Rom. 10:9), they can only be a repetition, expansion or confirmation of…
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Co-Everything
When Paul wants to describe salvation, he tells what happened to Jesus, and then annexes believers to that. We died with Christ, were raised with Christ, and are alive together in Christ. Paul even found the shortest possible way of making this point: By taking the main verbs of the story of Jesus and putting…
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Today Fred Sanders was Born (1968)
Fred Sanders (1968– ) is an American evangelical theologian known for his work on the doctrine of the Trinity and his Christian comic book series. (Seriously.) Raised in Kentucky, Sanders polymathically found his way into any number of intellectual huddles in the early part of his career. He began his formal post-secondary education training as…
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William Booth’s Army of Salvation
William Booth (born today, April 10, 1829; died 1912) came out of nowhere, or out of “darkest England” as he called it, and did more good in one lifetime than could reasonably be expected from one man, even a man with so remarkable a wife as his Catherine. In 1890 Henry Morton Stanley thrilled England…
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No One Takes My Life From Me; I Have Authority to Lay it Down
This is one of my favorite images of Christ and the cross. It is not a historically accurate photo of what happened on Good Friday. Jesus didn’t climb a ladder to get onto the cross. But this image tells that Jesus was the active one, the agent, in the atonement that took place between God…
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The Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: April 9, 1945
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (born 1906) was executed on this day, April 9, in 1945. He had been involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged for that political action. He was plotting murder and got caught; there were non-Christians undertaking the same action. His death is hardly the stuff of straightforward martyrdom, hardly as…