Search results for: “trinity”

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 simple gratitude, praise may terminate provisionally on proximate blessings, but…

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 I’ve summarized in evangelical vernacular.) But Chautard’s book doesn’t just…

In an article in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, T. Mahlmann claims that the first use of the word christology occurs in Friedrich Balduin’s commentary on Paul’s letters. When I ran across this reference in a footnote about something else, I realized (a) I found this to be both a little bit interesting and a little…

Michael Horton’s Rediscovering the Holy Spirit is a carefully-wrought work which re-organizes much of the material we expect to find in a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In it, Horton connects some things that are too often bifurcated while distinguishing some things that are too often conflated. Horton’s pneumatology pushes and pulls on some of…

  For the spring semester of 2019, I’ll be one of the resident fellows at the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. The Henry Center is undertaking a multi-year project about creation, and this year’s theme is “Reclaiming Theological Anthropology in an Age of Science.” I’m…

The final paragraph of Augustine’s On True Religion is a tight triple knot, a threefold cord triply cinched to make an amazing rhetorical conclusion about the unity of the Trinity and the threefoldness of salvation. On True Religion is among Augustine’s early works; one of the last pieces he wrote before becoming a priest. He…

I just got a copy of the new Ancient-Modern Bible from Thomas Nelson. It’s a kind of study Bible with running commentary in the margins drawn from the whole history of the church, and several dozen biographies introducing some of the historical commentators. It also has a section of Christian art, and a number of articles on…

There is a powerful and fascinating piece of iconography in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, inside one of the domed cupolas. It’s a ceiling mosaic featuring this image:   It’s a dove on a book on ornate drapery on a pillow on a throne. This throne simply hovers in midair, inside of concentric circles. From behind…

Has the dust settled yet on the massively multi-player online battle royale evangelical Trinity discussion of 2016? Here’s a sign that the dust has settled: there are now books on the subject in print. Three books, in fact. The first is P&R’s publication of Hongyi Yang’s dissertation. The title of the book is A Development, Not a…

On page 224 of The Triune God (Zondervan, 2016), I said “No to Christophanies.” That is, as part of my chapter discussing the Old Testament’s adumbrations of trinitarian revelation, I cautioned against identifying even the anthropomorphic theophanies in the Old Testament as distinct manifestations of the second person of the Trinity. This is, of course,…

In the seventeenth century, Huguenot Jean Claude wrote a long essay in French on how to compose a sermon. In the eighteenth century, English Baptist Robert Robinson of Cambridge translated it and annotated it. In the nineteenth century, Charles Simeon, also of Cambridge, republished Robinson’s translation of Claude’s essay and commended it to a wider…

There’s an important sense in which theology doesn’t ever change at all. There’s a logos of theos, a knowledge of God, that is truly immutable. To speak of this unchanging character of the knowledge of God, though, we have to raise our eyes higher than we are accustomed to do. We have to look up…