Search results for: “trinity”

Christology is one of the most important doctrines in all of theology, and also one of the most difficult. The standards of proof here are high, because the claims —that this man is God, one of the Trinity, the eternal Son— are so outrageous. It is incumbent on all Christians, I think, to be able…

Once upon a time, the people most committed to the gospel were the people most inclined to serious theological thought. The deepest doctrines of Christianity, the ones which are not on the surface of the scriptures but lie waiting in its depths, were quarried through disciplined theological meditation and patient discernment. It was not academics…

Jesus died for me. Anyone who believes this simple sentence has entered the sphere of Christian faith, and has learned the one thing that God is concerned to teach his human creatures, in order to bring them into his school for all further lessons. “Jesus died for me” is knowledge that can be grasped by…

Some things are worth thinking about, and some things just aren’t. Some subjects repay closer examination, and the longer you spend meditating on them, the more they reveal their own richness and unfold their conceptual complexity. Other things have the opposite effect: the more time and effort you put into pondering them, the more you…

Before he gives his testimony of conversion to Christ, Nabeel Qureshi makes it clear that he was perfectly satisfied with Islam as he experienced it. He tells about his upbringing in a devout, peaceful, and intellectual Muslim family, where he was a role model for other Muslim children because he had read the Qur’an in…

“Preexistence” is an awkward word. It looks like it needs a hyphen (pre-existence) or a diaeresis (preëxistence). Plus, the “pre” in preexistence begs to be clarified: Insurance Agent: Do you have any pre-existing conditions? Patient: Yes. Wait. I have a condition, and it exists. Insurance Agent: So does it preexist? Patient: Well, if it preexists,…

There is an argument about the American founders which is always going on somewhere, and is never productive. First speaker: “This is a Christian nation, with a Christian founding, and the religion reflected in all of our founding documents is Christianity. None of our polity makes sense without the Judeo-Christian origins.” Second speaker: “This is…

Here is a piece of vintage R. A. Torrey (1856-1928), published in 1917. Everything you could love or hate about Torrey is right here in cold print: the quick wit, the principled stand, the willingness to embrace the social stigma of conservative orthodoxy, the vicious counter-attack on the cultured despisers of religion, the readiness to…

Who is the Holy Spirit? What is his characteristic personhood, which distinguishes him from the Father and the Son? How is it that he isn’t simply interchangeable with the ascended Jesus Christ, or on the other hand interchangeable with the invisible Father, or on the other other hand, identical with the one divine essence? He…

Charles Wesley wrote: O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me! —which is a bold thing to say, because it claims so much. “God…died.” The Bible itself says it that bluntly in a few places, such as Acts 20:28, “God purchased the church with his own blood.” This is…

After posting about Cheynell’s 1650 Trinity book, I looked again at the title page and realized he didn’t publish it as a book about The Divine Triunity, but about the Divine TriNunity. As far as I can tell, he meant to spell it that way. Later readers who wrote about his book sometimes got the…

Can a merely unitarian God answer prayer? Andrew Murray said no. In the 17th chapter of With Christ in the School of Prayer: Thoughts on our Training in the Ministry of Intercession, Murray considers “Prayer in Harmony with the Being of God,” and poses these questions: One of the secret difficulties with regard to prayer,—one…