Fred SandersPosts by Fred Sanders
Trinitectomy
Here are a few pages from Dr. Doctrine’s Christian Comix , volume 3 (InterVarsity Press, 1998). I’m testing out how the images look on various platforms and devices. Try reading…
Read MoreOn the Twofold, as they say, Trinitarian Theology (Latin and Greek)
There is a brief appendix in Joseph Dalmau’s On the One and Triune God (1955), entitled “On the Twofold, as they say, Trinitarian Theology—Latin and Greek.” Dalmau begins, “today…there is…
Read MoreFilioque According to Me
Jerome Van Kuiken of Okalahoma Wesleyan University presented a paper at ETS 2021 in November on “Wesleyans and the Filioque.” His survey featured some recent evangelical Wesleyan theological treatments of…
Read MoreThe Word’s First Words
Rudolf Stier wrote nine volumes (4500 pages) of detailed commentary on every word spoken by Jesus and recorded in the Bible. You might imagine how seriously such an author would…
Read MoreSignifying Equality with Movement
I came across something helpful in Aquinas (ST Iª q. 42 a. 1 ad 3). Check it out: Should we call the persons of the Trinity equal? Well of course…
Read MoreKids’ Lesson
Every so often I get to teach the kids at church (K-5) the intro lesson before they head off to their main classes. Okay, “every so often” means when the…
Read MoreAuthority Under, Not Within, God
[This blog post is an archive of a thread I posted on Twitter, Nov 2021. I’ve left it in Twitter format (ten tweets, 475 words) because the temptation to expand…
Read MoreAppropriation of Blessedness
I have sometimes wondered about the doctrine of God’s blessedness: to which of the persons of the Trinity should this divine attribute be appropriated? Appropriation is “a process…by which certain…
Read MoreFirst John on its Own Terms
For those of us whose theological home base is Paul, pondering First John is wonderful but strange. There’s no contradiction between John & Paul, but the voice is astonishingly different.…
Read MoreCover Story: Birds at the Fountain
My book Fountain of Salvation: Trinity & Soteriology (Eerdmans, 2021) has a cover that is both beautiful and meaningful. It features a fifth-century mosaic of two birds drinking from a…
Read MoreTwo Ways with Divine Emotion
It seems perfectly reasonable to ask about God’s emotions: does he have them, does he feel them, how are they like and unlike our emotions, and so on. In the…
Read MoreOne Will in the Trinity (Sketch of an Argument)
One of the stumbling blocks moderns face when they engage with classical trinitarian theology is that the main stream of the tradition resolutely affirms that there is one will in…
Read MoreNot Just Cooperation: The Action of the Three
When three people work together on a project, each of them does their own part of it. As Gregory of Nyssa describes it, “even if several are engaged in the…
Read More“One Fire: Light, Brightness, and Heat” (Bullinger on the Trinity)
Swiss Reformer Henry Bullinger (1504–1575) concludes his sermon “Of the Holy Ghost” (Decades, IV:7) with a wonderfully clear and compelling recapitulation of “Unity in trinity and Trinity in unity” (interestingly…
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