Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Keeping the Law Paul states just as emphatically as James that the doers of the law will be justified (Rom. 2:13; James 2:14ff). But who are these doers of the law? Is Paul speaking hypothetically of a class of sinless people who do not really exist? Or does he have…
I have entitled this super-condensed piece to capture interest, but the fact is it sets forth what I have believed and taught long before I had ever heard of the so-called “new perspective.” For example, one can look at my paper on Ephesians 2.15 , written before I had ever…
N. T. Wright and other “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP) theologians have been criticized and condemned for speaking of justification in various “tenses.” In fact, Wright typically begins discussions of justification with future justification and works his way back to the present. But this is hardly a novelty. While the…
A doctrine of “faith alone” must be explicated and lived out in the light of the larger story of faithfulness, a story that reaches its climax in Jesus, the faithful Messiah. Indeed, the idea of “faith alone,” and even Paul’s use of the OT in service of that idea, makes…
In every city in the United States there are at least a couple of Christian radio stations which broadcast preaching around the clock, seven days a week. Many areas have a Christian television station or two which broadcast worship services several hours a day. Almost any bookstore will have a…
The queston has been discussed: which is prior, faith or repentance? It is an unnecessary question and the insistence that one is prior to the other is futile. There is no priority. The faith that is unto salvation is a penitent faith and the repentance that is unto life is…
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For Thomas, the advantage of explicating the Trinity by reference to knowing and willing was that these are two human processes that remain within the soul.  They remain within the realm of praxis. Jenson notes that the great achievement of Barth’s Trinitarian theology is to start elsewhere, not with “self-contained”…
Gregory of Nyssa identifies Arianism as a form of tragic metaphysics.  They go astray because they “define God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divide eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find that mark of…
Is God’s being in His becoming?  We might not want to say that.  But we can’t avoid the question, if we want to continue the patristic project of “evangelizing metaphysics.” For the Greeks, Jenson writes, “Being” is “what satisfies the mind’s longing for absolute assurance, for transcendence over time’s surprises.”…
Definitely not this either: “there is properly no mutual love between the Father and Son, for this would presuppose two acts” and “within the Trinity there is no reciprocal ‘Thou.’”
Barth did not see Nazism as a reaction to or restriction on the untrammeled freedom of choice celebrated by modern liberals.  On the contrary, it was itself the product of the same “false concept of freedom” that shaped post-Enlightenment Europe. If freedom means life “in free competition of persons, systems,…
Barth argues that the Trinity is not a challenge or a qualification of monotheism, but the only true form of monotheism.  Antitrinitarianism always collapses either into the denial of God’s revelation or of God’s unity. Denial of revelation because “To the degree that it maintains the unity of God it…
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