Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“We have a God who hides things because He loves to be sought out, chewed out and found out.” As Christians, we are rightly taught that we must not question God’s Word. The problem is that the Scriptures record many things which appear to have been given to us for…
The book of Revelation is a liturgy. John begins “in the Spirit” on the “Lord’s day” (1:10). Jesus appears, and Jesus tells him to record messages to seven churches, words of encouragement and rebuke, like the call to worship and confession at the beginning of a Christian liturgy. In chapter…
In my previous posts, I looked at the theme of creation as it is found in a sequence of psalms devoted to Yahweh’s Kingship (Psalms 93-100). Among other matters, these psalms declare that when the Kingdom of Israel’s God comes, it is the Kingdom of the world’s own Creator .…
The church in Corinth was a pastoral nightmare. Factionalism, sexual immorality, incipient syncretism, using the church as a stage for self-promotion, and denial of the final resurrection were just some of the problems. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he confronts each of these problems directly and in…
The first chapters of the Word of God have a poetic rhythm. This is used to discredit their accuracy as historical narrative, but the truth is that these same rhythms continue far beyond the book of Genesis. In fact, the later texts shed light on the frustratingly succinct account of…
Mr. Martian: What’s that there? Mr. Edison: (Edison holds up a standard, 60 watt lightbulb). It’s a lightbulb. Mr. Martian: A “lightbulb” you say? What exactly is a “lightbulb”? Mr. Edison: A lightbulb is an object used to illuminate a dark area, say a room. It’s made primarily of filament…
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Gregory of Nyssa discerned that Arianism erred because it “defines God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divine eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find the mark of deity in endless futurity . . .…
My two favorite paragraphs from Jenson’s Triune Identity : “‘Out of the being of the Father’ affirms just that origin of Christ within God’s own self which Arius most feared. The phrase says that the Son is not an entity originated outside God by God’s externally directed choice, that he…
Behind Arianism, Jenson sees the typical Hellenistic desire to escape time: “what moves Arius is the late-Hellenic need to escape time, to become utterly dominant. If we are to be saved, Arius supposes, there must be some reality entirely uninvolved with time, which has no origin of any sort and…
Jenson summarizes several thread of Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology: “Tertullian’s interpretation of God was far more biblical than that of the Apologists. He explicitly distinguished the living personal God of Scripture from both the numina of the old Roman religion and the abstract deity of Hellenism . . . . So…
The basic structure of redemptive history is an exitus and reditus structure, going out from God and return to Him. For Thomas, Emery says, “The Trinitarian processions provide the doctrinal foundation of the exitus-reditus structure of the world and of history.” He quotes Thomas as saying, “Just as the procession…
RPC Hanson writes, “At the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their opponents was defised in order to find a way of envisaging the Christian doctrine of God which would…
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