Search results for: “trinity”

Christmas is past, and in a church calendar that tracks with the life of Jesus, the season of epiphany is here. In some parts of the Christian tradition, that means it’s time to think about the wise men, who actually got to Bethlehem far too late to pose for the manger scene. In other parts…

Last week I spoke at the annual Religious Diversity Forum at the University of California at Irvine. Most of my time there was spent in open discussion with a small group of people, including a rabbi and a nice Muslim woman who was fascinated by the idea of Baptist foot-washing services. But here are my…

Claude Welch, eminent historian of nineteenth-century theology, died on November 6. Claude was an institutional pillar of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I got my PhD. In their obituary, the GTU lists his terms of service to the school. He was Dean and President from 1971 to 1982, and Dean from 1982 to…

The Apostles’ Creed has three articles, one for each person of the Trinity. The first article, on God the Father Almighty, is very short. He created heaven and earth. Much more could be said, but it isn’t said. The second article is the longest, because it tells the story of Jesus: conceived by the Spirit,…

The main reason the doctrine of the Trinity can be difficult for inquirers to grasp, or for believers to get comfortable with, is that it contains so many ideas within itself. It is a doctrine that summarizes vast stretches of biblical revelation, integrates them, and holds them together so they can be taken in at…

At the very end of Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the Trinity (questions 27-43 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae), he deals with the way the Son and Spirit are sent into the world by the Father. That is, he takes up the subject of the divine missions. It’s a brilliant discussion in its…

Nicky Cruz is not famous for his trinitarian theology. He is famous for having been the “warlord” of a violent street gang called the Mau-Maus in New York City in the 1950s, and for the dramatic story of his 1958 conversion to Christianity. At the center of his conversion story was a confrontation between this…

William Henry Griffith Thomas (1861-1924) wrote an excellent one-volume systematic theology called The Principles of Theology. Published in 1930, it takes the form of an evangelical commentary on the 39 Articles of the Church of England. According to J.I. Packer, the book “may be said to have rounded off a four-hundred year era of Protestant…