Search results for: “trinity”

In the fifth book of Augustine’s On the Trinity (Prologue), having declared for the umpteenth time his inadequacy in writing about such subjects, he lays down some rules for how we should think about God: Thus we should understand God, if we can and as far as we can, to be good without quality, great…

Does God have a soul? That’s a weird question. But here’s a tidy answer, from Amandus Polanus’ (1561-1610) Substance of Christian Religion. See the screencap for quaint spellings & suchelike. Yes, God has a soul. “By the soul is meant the life of God, that is to say, the very essence of God itself.” In other…

This Easter season, my reading on the resurrection has included the relevant section from Isaac Ambrose (1604-1664)’s book Looking Unto Jesus. The resurrection portion of the 700-page book is about 80 pages long, and Ambrose takes his sweet time examining how Christ was “carrying on the great work of man’s salvation” in his rising from the…

Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety is a classic work of doctrine and devotion that demolishes the idea that there’s any division between the two. Those of us who simply love to read theology, more or less for its own sake, sometimes need to be reminded that knowing  God has practical ends as well. And those…

Here is the video of a sermon I preached on Reformation Day 500 in Talbot Chapel at Biola. It’s got bacon, Reddit, semantic drift, a killer visual aid, some Bible thumping, karma, and the Trinity in it. It’s also about Ephesians.

The book I co-edited, Retrieving Eternal Generation, is releasing this month, and a few people have asked me about the cover. The beautiful, beautiful cover. There are a few reasons this cover features golden stars on a blue background. One is that I saw an opportunity to make people look at mosaics from Ravenna, and that…

My review of Anthony Thiselton’s Shorter Guide to the Holy Spirit is out in the new issue of Theology Today. Here’s the most substantive paragraph from the review, which picks out an important contribution Thiselton makes: There are a few theses running through all this material. One of the most important is that we should unlearn…

I’m teaching a class session on Martin Luther’s amazing treatise “On the Last Words of David,” which is Luther’s most satisfying exposition of Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible. It really is a handbook of principles on how to interpret Scripture in Trinitarian fashion: how to find the Trinity in the Old Testament, how to understand the…

Theologian Robert W. Jenson died this week, after a very productive life of writing theology. His contributions to the field are numerous and wide-ranging, and yet his life-work had a remarkable coherence and focus. There’s an identifiable set of Jenson proposals out there to be dealt with by serious theologians. As he himself said, “it…

The title caught my eye: “Processions, Human and Divine.” I am very (very!) interested in divine processions: the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Knowledge of these two processions is knowledge of the Trinity. But what are these “human processions?” My interest piqued, I grabbed the January 1951 issue…

What I love in theology is the big picture, the long lines of continuity. Whenever I read, I’m always looking for the unifying perspective that arises when a theologian finds an angle from which to behold the overarching unity that lets all the details settle into place. What I dread most in theology (second only…

If you’d like to take a class with me on the doctrine of the Trinity, you don’t have many options. I teach in a small program for undergrads only, and they get most of my teaching time. So my classroom presence is pretty limited to Torrey Honors students. [record scratch noise] UNTIL NOW! Zondervan has…