Blog

Ephesians 2:17 says that Christ “came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.” (ἐλθὼν εὐηγγελίσατο εἰρήνην ὑμῖν τοῖς μακρὰν καὶ εἰρήνην τοῖς ἐγγύς) It’s a powerful statement, especially following the previous statements that Christ in person “is our peace” (2:14) and “made peace” (2:15). The sequence of being, making, and proclaiming peace certainly positions Christ as the prince of peace in what he is, does, and announces. Leaning in a little closer, commentators rightly ask: when? When did Christ come and preach peace to Gentile (“far off)” and Jew (“near”)? It’s a great question, and has produced some excellent commentary. In this post, I just want to relay a brief survey of as many interpretations as I can. They are gathered in Ernest Best’s 1998 ICC commentary, 271-273. Best provides sources for each view, identifying previous commentators who have championed them….

In the first chapter of The Holy Spirit: An Introduction, I describe how “the overall pattern of scriptural revelation is that the Holy Spirit’s presence becomes clear at the end of the process but then turns out to have always already been there.” The spiritual point is that we never quite get “introduced” to the Holy Spirit as a total stranger, but as someone who has already been present to us and active on us. When he opens our minds to his presence, we may feel deep things stirring within our hearts, bringing up half-remembered glimpses and partial awareness that Something or Someone has been with us for some time. Here’s one way I say it in the book: He sometimes seems to us to be introduced late, like some kind of an afterthought. But God has no afterthoughts. What he apparently has is…

As I was reading widely in preparation for writing a book about the Holy Spirit, I kept coming across a lament (an accusation?) that many Christians are guilty of forgetting, ignoring, or failing to adequately honor, the Spirit. And my own experience, after months of studying pneumatology, was that there certainly were great treasures stored up here in this doctrine, and that more people should spend more time with them. Though the time had come to finish the book and send it to the publisher, I felt like I wasn’t anywhere near finished learning about, and paying close attention to, God the Holy Spirit. But especially at the popular level, it started to seem like 90% of the books I read about the Holy Spirit kept up the same lament: “Alas, alas, most Christians ignore the Holy Spirit! We are so awful, shame on…

Once upon a time, a Franciscan nun named Crescentia (full name: Maria Crescentia Höss of Kaufbeuren, 1682–1744) had a vision. “The Holy Spirit appeared to her in the guise of a youth clad in a gown and a cloak as white as snow, with bare head and curly hair and with seven flames or fiery tongues hovering around his head.”1 Wow! Crescentia and her monastic superiors sent for a painter, to whom Crescentia carefully described her vision. Under the close guidance of the visionary herself, the painter produced an impressive image that became popular among the nuns and, soon, the surrounding community. Here’s a version of the painting. There’s the lovely young man, presenting himself and his glory, surrounded by beams of light, tongues of flame, and a shining halo. But those golden-light phenomena are just what we would expect from any purported vision…

Here’s a handout I use with undergrads who are reading Homer’s Odyssey at the beginning of the semester, and will read the book of Hebrews at the end. It just puts interlinear versions of the two books’ opening lines side by side, so we English-reading students can consider the coincidence that a neat word, polytropos, occurs early in both works. It really ties the semester together. These word-for-word translations show the tension: Odysseus is a man of “many turns,” but God spoke to the Fathers “in many ways.” We would hardly want to confuse the wiliness of Odysseus with the biblical God’s providential guidance of salvation history. Same word, different works. But the word polytropos is worth lingering over, especially if you’ve got both books open in front of you. A Homer commentary describes πολύτροπον as an “epithet of Odysseus” that occurs only here…

Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835-1888)’s treatment of Christology fills hundreds of pages in the soteriological fifth volume of his Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics (originally published 1880s; ET 2020). It’s got all the comprehensiveness, detail, and synthetic force that are hallmarks of his work. It’s hard to characterize what’s unique or distinctive about a work so deeply traditional and fundamentally conservative. But here’s an angle on Scheeben’s Christology: it’s organized around the name Christ. In a few places, Scheeben emphasizes the fact that the discipline of Christology is rightly so called: it is the study of Christ, and the name ‘Christ’ contains the entire scope of the doctrine. Scheeben surveys “the personal names of the Redeemer,” distinguishing them into “two categories, depending on whether they have directly in view the man or the God.” (56) The leading names that pick out the humanity of the redeemer…

British composer Cecilia McDowall has written a fascinating modern choral anthem whose title comes from the final words of Ephesians (6:24): “Love Incorruptible.” Actually the anthem takes its entire text from various places in the second half of Ephesians, gathering under the title “love incorruptible” a short series of the book’s ethical exhortations. Here is the anthem’s entire text, to which I’ve added verse references: Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away. [4:31]Awake! [5:14]Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. [4:26]Walk with all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love. [4:2]Be kind, tender-hearted, one to another, forgiving one another, even as God also in Christ forgave you. [4:32]Giving thanks always for all things. [5:20]Speaking, singing, and making melody with your heart. [5:19]With a love incorruptible [6:24] It’s only about 70 words long, but it takes…

Here’s the script of a sermon I preached on Luke 20:27-44 (Jesus versus the Sadducees) at my home church, Grace Evangelical Free Church of La Mirada, on June 25, 2023. We’re preaching our way through Luke, and it’s great to have plenty of time and space to dig deep into what Jesus taught. The sung worship included a version of The God of Abraham Praise, an excellent eighteenth-century hymn based on a medieval Jewish song (Yigdal). I. Opening (Emmaus)II. Resurrection-Question          A. That’s not how any of this works          B. How dare you?III. The Burning BushIV. God’s Right Hand I. Opening (Emmaus): There is a scene at the very end of Luke’s Gospel that has always arrested my attention. It’s in Luke 24 –we’re going to be in Luke 20 this morning, but do you remember this scene at the end of the Gospel where…

Here are a couple of visual aids I routinely use when teaching from Psalm 110. The first is a simple diagram to help readers pick out the three characters identified in verse 1: It’s as much a diagram of Matthew 22:44 as it is of Psalm 110:1 itself. That is, it captures Jesus’ explanation of the oracle. Does the diagram make you want to make some changes? Want another crown? Less cartoony rendering? Want that glory centered up? More accurate linear perspective on the throne? Great! Help yourself. I don’t make diagrams bad on purpose, but I do consider a diagram to be successful if it makes its point and also draws the viewer in with so much investment that they want to fiddle with it and make it better. As long as the diagram isn’t false, and stops short of being extremely annoying,…

A few remarks I made at a ceremony for the five-year anniversary of the artistic renovation of Biola University’s Calvary Chapel on June 22, 2023: This chapel is named Calvary. The authorized way to enter its sacred space is to pass under the sculptural cross suspended above the doors. But then once you enter, you look around to find yourself actually standing inside of an architecturally cross-shaped space. It is an ancient tradition in Christian architecture to shape our buildings this way. Starting from the old pagan Roman basilica, a kind of rectangular ceremonial hallway terminating in an apse, Christians had the bright idea of adding two transepts. And voila, the arms crossing the basilica produce a diagram of the cross. Of course the form of the cross is most evident not from the inside, but from an aerial view, from a bird’s-eye perspective,…

John Flavel’s Method of Grace (2nd ed., 1699) is a wonderful treatise whose scope is clear from its elaborately long title and subtitle: The Method of Grace in Bringing Home the Eternal Redemption Contrived by the Father and Accomplished by the Son, through the effectual Application of the Spirit unto God’s Elect, being the Second Part of Gospel Redemption, Wherein the Great Mystery of our Union and Communion with Christ is Opened and Applied, Unbelievers Invited, False Pretenders Convicted, Every Man’s Claim to Christ Examined, and the Misery of Christless Persons Discovered and Bewailed: The Second Edition, Very Much Corrected (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1699) Whew! The book appeared with various long sub-titles (if ‘sub-title’ is even the right word for all the copy that fills a seventeenth-century title page) in various editions. This second edition “very much corrected” has the longest one. I like…

In 2021 I wrote up a report on how William Burt Pope translated over a dozen works of conservative German biblical scholarship in the 1850s (in his 30s, before publishing his own theological work). It was a brilliant strategic move for a conservative Methodist theologian. Pope essentially invested in building up and making available in English the exact kind of biblical scholarship that he wanted to interact with theologically. GENIUS. But Pope’s labors were part of a larger movement to make conservative German biblical scholarship available to English readers. Check out David Lincicum’s 2017 article, “Fighting Germans with Germans: Victorian Theological Translations between Anxiety and Influence” (Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 2017 24(2): 153-201). Lincicum explores how T&T Clark published many volumes from many scholars; Pope was just one of the translators. Another translator worth noting: Sophia…

A trinitarian analogy (“the Trinity is like an egg;” “the Trinity is like a team,” “the Trinity is like the structure of consciousness,” etc.) is a conceptual tool. It’s designed to do something. But what? I suspect most people would say that what a trinitarian analogy does is construct a kind of rough model of what God is like, in some limited way. Most analogy fans will freely admit trinitarian analogies don’t get you very far, but they at least provide some sort of example of something that is three without ceasing to be one. “Don’t push them too far,” and so on, but they do take a step toward satisfying the mind’s desire to reason analogically from more observable things (egg, apple, group, consciousness, triple point, Hegelian dialectic, Riemann zeta function with infinite sets of sets and a fractalized Cantorian half-gainer) to the…

David Dickson (1583–1663) wrote a lively commentary on NT epistles, in which he adopted a strongly analytic style. His method was to capture the main idea of a passage in the form of a proposition, and then to show that the proposition was supported by a number of arguments in the following verses. That’s an interesting approach: different from a running grammatical commentary (one that would trace the way the epistle’s own argument unspools), but also different from rearranging the argument into a new sequence (for instance handling the theology under the heading of a doctrinal locus, as an excursus). In practice, Dickson’s approach seems like a hybrid of the two. It’s somehow both a bird’s-eye view and also a verse-by-verse, even phrase-by-phrase, walk-through. Here’s a particularly clear example. Dickson takes up the section of Ephesians 1 in which Paul prays that God would…

Henry Alford (1810-1871) wrote a large-scale commentary on the Greek New Testament, and then condensed that into a commentary on the Authorized and Revised edition for English readers. He’s attentive to text-critical and exegetical issues, well equipped in classical scholarship and well informed in the history of exegesis (especially in English, German, and Latin) down to his time. But with all these details at his command, he also kept a remarkably clear eye open for the big, synthetic, theological picture at all times. One example, from Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1. Alford has much to say about Paul’s report that he is asking for “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, to give his readers “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.” I’ve condensed and cleaned it up a lot to bring out his main moves:…

While pastoring in Kelso, Scotland in the 1840s, Horatius Bonar [1808-1889] occasionally published little pamphlets, between three and twelve pages long, just to reach his local audience. Though he initially intended them only as written “helps to his own pastoral work,” without “any ambitious aim of writing for a wider circle,” they proved popular beyond his own congregation. He gathered 37 of these and published them under the title of Kelso Tracts; in this form they became a minor evangelical masterpiece of spiritual theology. The bound volume runs to about 300 pages, but its original editions didn’t have continuous page numbering: the page count started over with each tract, reinforcing their origin as individual booklets. A few of the tracts are actually republications of older authors (Becon, Baxter, Whitefield1) in a form Bonar could easily distribute. Such an assemblage of tracts is bound to…