Kimlyn Bender has a fine new book out called Reading Karl Barth for the Church: A Guide and Companion. If you want to get the most out of reading Barth, but you don’t have a good teacher on hand or a class to sign up for, this book will equip you to pick up the Church Dogmatics for...

This new book caught my eye: Freedom under the Word: Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis(Baker, 2019).

Let me just admit that the first reason is personal: It’s got essays by three of my theology friends who are alum of the Torrey Honors Institute. Ben Rhodes (co-editor) wrote the...

We need some good papers on pneumatology.

In January 2020, the Los Angeles Theology Conference will take up the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, under the title “The Third Person of the Trinity.” We’ve already invited five plenary speakers to address this doctrine, and if you know...

I’ve been puzzling over a perplexing passage from Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918). Holland was an English theologian who did his best theologizing in sermons, especially in the preaching he did at St. Paul’s in London, where he was a canon. The passage that I’ve been puzzling over...

Merciful Trinity by Sr. Caritas Müller, OP

Humans are not nothing. But fundamentally we are made from nothing, and deep down, we know it. At least some of us do.

Ruth Burrows knows that humans are poised between God and the nothing out of which we were made, the nothing that is always with us in...

Here is a helpful way of thinking about the relation between the life of Jesus  and the resurrection of Jesus. “His life rose with him.”

When Jesus rose from the dead, he not only came back to life, but also brought back with him the life that he had already lived. In addition to...

This is a blog post about everything, but mainly about everything in relation to God.

I found a striking example of how the Christian confession of the distinction between the creator and the creature can be preached and applied. It’s Richard Baxter’s The Crucifying of the World by the...

As a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine oblate one of my favorite parts of the sixth-century Rule of Benedictis Chapter 49 – “On the Observance of Lent.” Benedict writes, “the life of a monk ought to have about it at all times the character of a Lenten...

There are three kinds of people in the world: People who think everything can be broken down meaningfully into threes, and people who don’t. Plus some third kind of person, to make a total of three, which is my point. Please clap.

Which brings us to the truly brilliant Richard Baxter...

You’re probably aware that Biola’s Talbot School of Theology is starting an innovative new program, the M.A. Classical Theology. We are admitting students now, so if you are looking for a program that will take you to the heart of what theology is, take a look at it.

This M.A. is made up...

In a sermon on Matt 3:17 (“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased”), Ralph Erskine (1685–1752) expounds the thesis that “God was in Christ.” The main thrust of the sermon is that there is a great difference between how God can be encountered in Christ as...

Homer & Moses by Raphael

Here is a great-books style argument for the unity of Genesis, from Robert Candlish’s 1868 book on Genesis. It turns on a comparison of Moses and Homer, but is mainly a matter of aesthetic perception of literary unity.

Moses, as it seems to me, has fared very much...

Thomas Adams (1583–1653) was a famous preacher, and no wonder. His sermons are so full of ideas and fresh expressions that they fill the mind to bursting. What follows are just some notes I took on a few pages of one sermon. The sermon is “Semper Idem, or The Immutable Mercy of Jesus...

Today’s the release date for Matthew Barrett’s book, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Baker). Here’s the Amazon link, but do yourself a favor and look at the book’s home page on Baker Publishing’s site. I’m not necessarily saying...

In theological anthropology, some of the best witnesses to the nature of true humanity are those traditions which were forced to refute, in doctrine and in practice, the motivated denial of their own humanity. When African-American Christians, for example, found their footing and secured the kind...

I’ve been thinking about the doctrine of divine blessedness for several years, and in late February I got to gather my reflections on the subject for the 2019 Kistemaker Academic Lectures at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.

Here’s the slightly modified summary text about the...

My good friend Matthew Owen is a philosopher with a lively interest in theology. Some time ago he invited me to co-edit with him a theme issue of the journal Theologica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology. Matt and I have talked a lot over the...

I messed up footnote number eight on page 27 of my 2016 book The Triune God.

It’s a little more interesting than it sounds.

In that section, I’m describing how the structure of trinitarian theology is like the structure of praise:

In the form of simple gratitude, praise may terminate...

The main point of Jean-Baptiste Chautard’s Soul of the Apostolate is that if you want to live an active life of Christian service, you need to attend seriously to your spiritual formation and relationship with God. (He says it in more 19th-century Trappist style, which I’ve summarized...