Essay / Misc.

Divine Freedom & Immanent Trinity

Paul Molnar’s book Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity is now available in paperback. I just wrote a review of it for Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture. If you haven’t seen this journal, check it out: it’s new,

Essay / Misc.

The Trinity between OT and NT

In the fullness of time, the one God revealed that he eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine. But if you ask where the Trinity is clearly declared in scripture, you should take care

Essay / Theology

Amanda Smith Gets the Trinity

Evangelicals have long wrestled with the problem of having the doctrine of the Trinity functioning in their lives as an intellectual problem rather than as the confession of an experienced reality (see previous posts on Bunyan and Watts). This tension has come to expression repeatedly

Essay / Theology

Watts Pleads with the Trinity

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is demonstrably a trinitarian, but he felt a tremendous tension over the doctrine. In his time there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was truly scriptural (for a blow-by-blow account of trinitarian fights in English in the seventeenth century,

Essay / Theology

Schleiermacher: Trinity and Redemption

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was never persuaded that the doctrine of the Trinity had anything to do with the gospel. It is common enough to blame Schleiermacher for his role in marginalizing the doctrine of the Trinity: He famously placed the doctrine at the very end

Essay / Misc.

Preaching the Trinity: Brian Edgar’s New Book

Gerald Bray once noted the sad situation that although evangelicals are doctrinally correct on the Trinity, the doctrine “has not played a very central part in their thinking.” Going way back to the period following the Reformation, Bray points out that although refuting Unitarianism was

Essay / Education

A Few Questions for You (Commencement 2023)

This was the commencement address I gave to Torrey Honors College’s class of 2023. Torrey is a Socratic Great Books program, where the pedagogical coin of the realm is questions. So I put together an appropriate commencement talk. It’s for a very specific audience, has

Essay / Theology

The Rise of the Scholastic Theological Method

This is post 2 of 4 in a series on the monastic theological method. It looks forward to the publication of Greg Peters’ new book: Monastic Theology as Theological Method: The Superiority of the Monastery to the University. Join us in this article as Dr.

Essay / Literature

The Architecture of George Herbert’s Poetry

Introduction George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593, one of ten children. Though his father died when he was only three years old, Herbert’s mother, Magdalen, took responsibility for the education of her children. Moreover, she was decently well-connected, in that she ran a

Essay / Theology

Seismic Retrofit Apologia

“When the people in the pew ask the pastor to explain the Trinity, they do not want clever analogies or carefully worded creeds. They want to know what Scripture says about the Trinity.” Carl Beckwith says this in his book The Holy Trinity (Luther Academy,

Essay / Theology

The Joy of the Lord

Luke 3:21-22, the baptism of Christ: “the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove…” Brothers and sisters, we are reading here about the Holy Spirit, so what is there for me to say? Lift up your

Essay / Theology

Jesus Was Also Baptized

Luke 3:21: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…” Picture the scene: There was a big crowd at the river, and people were getting dunked in the water by John, who was so good at