Search results for: “trinity”

My review of Carl Beckwith‘s 2016 book The Holy Trinity just appeared in the July 2017 issue of The International Journal of Systematic Theology. It is a fantastic book, and I wanted to blog about it briefly to help spread the word to folks who may not see the review in IJST. Beckwith’s Holy Trinity deserves…

In January 2017 I got to teach about the Trinity at a Bible Institute in Haiti. I did it in partnership with More Than Bread, a ministry committed to training Haitian pastors with biblical and theological knowledge. In a developing country with obvious hardships and material needs, there are a lot of Christian missions doing charitable…

Here’s a free sentence for you, from chapter 4 of my soon-to-be-released book The Triune God: The most basic pedagogical decision to make in presenting the doctrine of the Trinity is whether to begin the exposition with the temporal missions and reason back from them to the eternal processions, or whether to take the opposite approach, beginning rather with the…

Here‘s a podcast organized by Fred Zaspel at Books at a Glance, in which he asks four theologians about recent controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity. The four theologians are Mike Ovey, Scott Swain, Steve Wellum, and me. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, which you’ll probably appreciate more if you’ve…

The June 2016 wave of Trinity discussion online has produced some really rich essays. Just off the top of my head, with apologies for slighting anybody, the posts by Darren Sumner, Matthew Barrett, and Matt Emerson have been a feast. I know it was controversy that summoned these theologians to crawl out of their offices and…

B. B. Warfield was commissioned to write the entry on the Trinity for the 1915 International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. The substantive entry (about 15,000 words, running for 20 columns in the ISBE) has been very influential, partly because it was incorporated into a well-regarded reference work, but mainly because of the high quality of Warfield’s writing.…

“The primary condition of knowledge for reading the Psalms is the ability to see as whose mouthpiece we are to regard the Psalmist as speaking, and who it is that he addresses.” So says Hilary of Poitiers at the beginning of his fourth-century Psalms commentary. And while Hilary is interested in identifying human authors and speakers,…

Why have theologians in the classic tradition of trinitarian doctrine found it easy to confess that the external actions of the Trinity are undivided? One reason is that they started from a clear confession that the internal actions of the Trinity were not undivided. Or, to put it less double-negatively, the internal actions of the…

“The external works of the Trinity are undivided,” says a classic principle of trinitarian theology. Whatever God does outside of the divine essence, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do as the one divine causal agent. This is great news for monotheism, because if three distinct divine agents were bringing about created effects by distinguishable…

Robert Saucy (1930-2015) taught systematic theology for 54 years at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology. If you doubled Bob’s length of service, you’d have the number 108, which is one year older than Biola itself. Bob began teaching at Talbot in 1961, when the graduate School of Theology was less than a decade old.…

I don’ think I’m giving away any surprise endings if I share a couple of key paragraphs from a 1963 book, Ceslaus Spicq’s The Trinity and our Moral Life According to St. Paul. After an introductory chapter on “the necessity of a revealed morality,” Spicq organizes the key chapters thus: Ch. 2   From the…