Essay / Theology

Sermon: The Trinity in Romans

A couple of weeks ago I preached at my home church, Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada. We had just completed a months-long series that had taken us through the whole book of Romans, and were finishing up with a few sermons on big

Essay / Theology

“Trinity, Schminity”

I have committed my life to helping people understand the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to seeing how it is relevant to their spiritual experience. I think it is a profoundly biblical doctrine, a reasonable thing to believe, the solution to numerous theological difficulties,

Essay / Misc.

How the Trinity Freed the Slaves (part II)

(Part I was here) A friend sends this photo from the west African country of Benin. The Benin coast is known as a slave coast, and has a fearsome monument known as The Gate of No Return marking the point of departure. A different monument,

Essay / Art

Trinity Statue

The San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor is an art museum with a notable sculpture collection. It is most famous for its seventy works by Auguste Rodin, the greatest set of Rodin sculptures anywhere in the world besides the actual Musee Rodin. But

Essay / Theology

Trinity Debate: Sanders vs. Buzzard

A few years ago I was invited to engage in a public debate on the Trinity with an anti-trinitarian teacher named Anthony Buzzard. Professor Buzzard teaches that Jesus was nothing more than a human uniquely used by God. His theology is basically Socinian, and he

Essay / Theology

Trinity, Fountain of Salvation

It’s easy to lapse into thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity as just some information about God. There’s some kind of downward pull on our thought-lives that makes Christianity seem like a set of 35 key ideas that you have to believe and remember.

Essay / Theology

What Books Should I Read on the Trinity? A Top Ten List

Every few months I get e-mails from people asking what books I would recommend on the Trinity. These are not requests for the latest scholarly work. They’re not focused inquiries with specific topics in mind. Nor are they requests for the greatest books of all

Essay / On This Day

For St. Patrick: Two Cheers for Trinity Analogies

My life is all about teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. And everywhere I go, the first question people ask me about the Trinity is “what’s a good analogy for the Trinity?” I usually make a sour face before I can catch myself, because in

Essay / Misc.

How the Trinity Freed the Slaves

The William Wilberforce movie is coming out, and I hear it’s pretty good. Here’s hoping the movie is at least good enough to get William Wilberforce back in the public eye. Wilberforce is justly famous as a man of action, and his legislative victories in

Essay / Misc.

Creation from Nothing, by the Trinity

The late Colin Gunton (1941-2003), in a flurry of productivity just before his untimely death, put out a bunch of books that are remarkable for containing enough ideas that they could each have been expanded into more books. Looking for a half-remembered quotation, I recently

Essay / Misc.

Trinity Book Title

Back in the seventeenth century, you could write a book and give it a title that included most of the content. In fact, as far as I can tell, Cheynell’s Divine Triunity has a title page which is nearly a chapter long. If I were

Essay / Misc.

Beauty of the Trinity

The Trinity is beautiful. By common consent, great is the beauty of holiness. God himself is that beauty than which nothing greater can be desired, to give Anselm’s “maximal being theology” an aesthetic spin. Because God, unlike creatures, is not compounded of separable parts, he