Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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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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