The story of the Bible is one of sojourns, exiles, homecomings. Adam and Eve leave the Garden. Abraham is called out of Ur. Moses leaves Egypt, returns, and leads his people back out again in a might Exodus that culminates in the Israelites arrival in the Promised Land, many years later.

McKenna and...

Occasionally in grad studies, you get fixated on a frustrating question that takes you down a productive little rabbit trail. I recently made my way down one while hunting out the original form of a nearly ubiquitous comment on the Trisagion in Isaiah 6:3, (“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God...

Once you think about it for a minute, it’s very obvious, but I’ve wanted to make this point for a while: counter-cultural bravery is a relative phenomenon.

Take the obvious example of someone uttering the phrase, “gay sex is a sin before the Lord.” Now, let’s all admit...

I want to briefly following up my earlier post on the fact that theology proper cannot subsist on biblical theology alone. Earlier this week I found out I was going to be preaching the temptation of Jesus out of Matthew 4 very shortly. And it hit me just how integrative, or multi-disciplinary you...

A few years ago I wrote a piece for Mere O called, “The Progressive Evangelical Package.” It probably helps to read it before proceeding. Simply put, though, before the language of “tribes” and “tribal thinking” became lingua franca, I tried to point...

This last couple of days I have been at the Paideia Center conference at RTS Orlando, where the main subject was the doctrine of the Trinity. The lectures and panels were all excellent, but I wanted to quickly highlight something Carl Trueman mentioned in passing (and I can’t remember if it...

At one point in his work Disturbing Divine Behavior, Eric Seibert presses his readers with a choice, “God either is or is not merciful” (173). If we decide God is merciful, then we should recognize that all texts involving violent judgment sit uncomfortably with that basic axiom.

At...

Last week I was feeling puckish, so I tweeted out, “What if, and just go with me here, what if only the sacraments are sacramental?”

I think most people got that I was being somewhat playful.  Still, some folks were, well, they weren’t entirely pleased. So I wanted to...

People who read Charles Taylor talk a lot about “disenchantment.” Well, other people to do too, but those are the folks I know. I am/have been one of them. The notion is contested, but very, very, very roughly, the idea is that part of what makes the modern world “modern” is...

For one reason or another, I’ve been digging around in the Church Fathers in my studies on holiness. Along the way, I’ve run across a couple of useful passages on the atonement in Cyril of Jerusalem and Hilary of Poitiers. The gist of it is this: even though we still commonly hear...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I had to break radio silence to write up a little notice about Michael Horton’s new, 2-volume work, Justification. It’s the fourth entry in the New Studies in Dogmatics series edited by Michael Allen and Scott...

A few weeks ago, I touched on the matter of consequentialist logic in theology. One of my arguments was that we need to be wary about rejecting some theological premise just because we are used to seeing it attached to some inference, some conclusion we don’t like. That’s because folks...

The first time I got called a heretic, I think I was about 19. I had just started getting into theology, biblical studies, N.T. Wright, that sort of thing, and was slowly walking away from the default dispensationalism of Orange County Evangelicalism. Well, at the time I also happened to be in a...

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree...

“None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable , you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize...

Will not a righteous God visit for these things?

Frederick Douglass asks this question in his autobiography after recounting the tragedy of his grandmother’s death. After a lifetime of bondage and servitude to her masters, when she was too old to be of use to them, they callously...

Sometimes things are too obvious to notice at first glance. Whether it’s your keys, or a key feature of a film you’ve watched a half-dozen times, we’ve all had moments where we finally notice something that was hiding in plain sight.

The same thing happens in theology from time to...

Isaiah 39 contains a haunting transitional narrative. In 36-37 we learn of the LORD’s rescue of Judah from the Assyrians after the good King Hezekiah turns to the Lord for help. In chapter 38, he learns of a sickness which will kill him, but again, upon his prayerful request, the LORD heals...

It’s amazing how much theology the NT writers get done in a short space. And not just “theology” in general, but theology proper–teaching on the nature, existence, and character of God. James is an excellent example of this that I only noticed recently. Consider how much we...

The doctrine of analogy aims to answer the question of how we can speak of an infinite God who transcends creaturely reality, thought, and language. Instead of saying words apply in exactly the same way to God and creatures (univocity), or that words apply in completely different ways to God and...

⁴ And we have such trust through Christ toward God. ⁵ Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, ⁶ who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter...