The Scriptorium Daily

Search results for: “trinity”

  • God the Father's Sons and Offspring

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    Fred Sanders
    in

                      I’ve been reading about the doctrine of God the Father, a doctrine which has no handy name. Following the model of christology (the doctrine about Jesus Christ) and pneumatology (the doctrine about the Holy Spirit), we ought to call it patrology, but that word is already…

  • Faith and Good Works, Christ and the Spirit

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Justification is by grace alone through faith alone. It’s a wonderful truth, established by Paul,  classically recovered and emphasized by the Reformers. But as the Reformers learned in the sixteenth century, and as Protestants ought always to keep in mind when teaching this great doctrine, it is open to unhelpful mis-interpretation by those who would…

  • Delighting in the Good (Triune) God

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    There’s a nice little book on the Trinity coming out soon, and I highly recommend it as a zippy intro to my favorite subject. The book is Delighting in the Trinity, by Michael Reeves, and here’s what I already said about it as a back-cover blurb: If you have ever felt that the doctrine of…

  • "The Divine Grip:" Ralph Del Colle (1954-2012)

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    Fred Sanders
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    Theologian Ralph Del Colle has passed away this week from cancer. When an accomplished thinker of his stature dies before age sixty, it is almost inevitable that he will have left some promising projects uncompleted. I think Ralph was working on a christology book, for instance, though I don’t know how far along the manuscript…

  • Torrey Cambridge 2012

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Every July, a group of students from Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute goes to Cambridge, England, for an intensive three-week class. If you know the Torrey program, you can imagine what it would be like to experience it in an environment as rich and stimulating as Cambridge. Students read classic texts from various disciplines, discuss them…

  • Imitating Jesus' Dependence on the Father and the Spirit

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Klaus Issler‘s new book Living into the Life of Jesus: The Formation of Christian Character (IVP, 2012) is a  unique product. It looks like a spiritual formation book, and it is. From its green cover with a picture of a lone figure walking down a path into a gauzy landscape, you can tell it’s going…

  • How to Teach Salvation: Three Mysteries

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    There are three great mysteries in Christian theology: the Trinity, the incarnation, and the atonement. These three mysteries are all mysteries of unity: The mystery of the Trinity is how the three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are the one, only God. The mystery of the incarnation is how the divine nature is united to…

  • The Myth of Trinitarian Marginalization

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    It’s a commonplace in contemporary theology to say that the doctrine of the Trinity was marginalized in the modern period, until it was recovered by Barth and Rahner. The doctrine was kept around, so the story goes, but it didn’t matter to theologians, and didn’t do any real work that made a difference. That’s the…

  • Mapping Modern Theology

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    I’m glad to see that Baker Academic has released Kelly Kapic and Bruce McCormack’s Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction.  This is a great textbook for understanding what’s happened in systematic theology over the last couple of centuries. I was honored to be invited to contribute a chapter (on the Trinity, of course). There’s…

  • Tom Smail (1928-2012): "The Spirit is Given from the Cross"

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Tom Smail, evangelical and charismatic British theologian of the Trinity, died last week (Feb 15). A few obituaries have appeared from those who knew him or studied with him. I knew him only from his remarkable books, which were always exquisitely balanced between tradition and creativity. As something of an evangelical-charismatic statesman, Smail tended to…

  • Foreword to Harrower's Trinitarian Self and Salvation

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    Fred Sanders
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    Scott Harrower of the Melbourne School of Theology has just published a book called Trinitarian Self and Salvation: An Evangelical Engagement with Rahner’s Rule (Wipf & Stock, 2012). About a decade ago, I wrote my own “evangelical engagement with Rahner’s Rule,” so Scott asked me to write the foreword for his project. I really appreciated…

  • Notes for a Doctrine of Creation

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Just a few thoughts here, brief notes on how a doctrine of creation ought to be handled in systematic theology. I state them as theses, as if I am declaring how every theologian ought to handle the doctrine. But really I’m talking to myself in public. 1. Work backwards. The doctrine of creation occurs early…