Essay / Theology

Pro-Nicene Theology (Free E-Book)

Short story: here’s a free theology book to download. Long story: In late 2016, Mike Allen and Scott Swain edited a blog series at Zondervan’s Common Places devoted to Pro-Nicene Theology. Pro-Nicene theology is trinitarianism, of course, but it’s not just the doctrine of the Trinity

Essay / Theology

God’s Omniscience as Law and Gospel (Sermon)

Earlier this month I got to preach in a chapel service at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology. I preached from Psalm 139 about divine omniscience, which has been much on my mind for the last few months. God knows everything about us, and the Bible

Essay / Theology

Make Good People Wish It Were True (Pascal)

After 9 hours of discussing Pascal’s Pensées with juniors in the Torrey Honors Institute this week, I feel (yes, in my heart, which knows many things reason cannot know) that he is a subtle author indeed. His fragmentary apologetic for the Christian religion, though in form it’s

Essay / Theology

Was Revealed, Is Revealed

Once upon a time, the triune God revealed the triunity of God. Before that time, God was triune but wasn’t saying so. Maybe there were hints and undertones here and there in the ways and words of the triune God throughout the Old Testament, but

Essay / Culture

Christmas is a Time for Family

Like most people I know, I have some very special Christmas memories, and many of them revolve around presents: the treasure-hunt gift that culminated in my first basketball, wrapped and hidden in a garbage can, or the tiny little present hidden on the tree itself

Essay / Theology

Absolute and Relative Regarding God

This post is just me preemptively sorting out some terminological confusion in academic trinitarian theology, so if you read it and then find yourself asking, “who cares?” you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The answer is, “seven people care.” So if you’re one of

Essay / Theology

Angels Speaking Creation Maybe

So I was in church and we were singing that nineteenth-century hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” and that one line “you who sang creation’s story now proclaim Messiah’s birth” got me thinking about how I’ve sometimes wondered who the implied speaker is in

Essay / Theology

The Triune God: Book Release Today

Today is the official release date of my book, The Triune God, in Zondervan’s ambitious New Studies in Dogmatics series edited by Allen and Swain. Its cover has a nice, minty green color that will look good under your favorite theologian’s Christmas tree. Put a little

Essay / Theology

Gift and Giver

In The Dialogue of Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), she describes how God deals with the widespread human tendency to take good things from God and then forget him. “Those whose love is imperfect,” she reports God as saying, “who love me for my gifts and

Essay / Culture

The Virtue of Tolerance

A virtue, in order to live up to its lofty title, must contain within itself its own proper resources for opposing the vice unique to it. As Aristotle taught us, virtues rarely travel alone; typically they wander the streets accompanied by distorted versions of themselves;

Essay / Culture

A Charge to Maintain Liberal Arts

A few weeks ago Biola had the delight of installing our new Provost and Senior Vice President, Dr. Deborah Taylor. Part of the installation involved a series of charges from faculty who had been invited to articulate some of the key challenges ahead of Dr.

Essay / Theology

Dogmatics Class for LATC17

In mid-January of 2017, the Los Angeles Theology Conference will bring a remarkable group of theologians to Biola University for a two-day discussion of “The Task of Dogmatics.” (Register before the end of November for the early registration discount.) Theology professors in southern California should