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John Norton’s 1654 book The Orthodox Evangelist (pdf, html) is mainly about salvation. Its title page describes it as “a treatise wherein many great evangelical truths… are briefly discussed, cleared, and confirmed, as a further help, for the begeting, and establishing of the faith which is in Jesus.” It’s a sign of doctrinal health, in my opinion, that while Norton wants to establish some truths about salvation, he begins with a substantive treatment of God and Christ. Norton is mainly interested in some details about what happens before justification by faith (200 pages), but he spends 125 pages putting in place the theological & Christological background for that soteriology. The great objective truths of Christian doctrine require our attention; those of us who are eager to teach about the subjective experience of salvation need to go out of our way to include that material….

In a comprehensive systematic theology, authors usually lay out their exposition of God’s perfections in a sequence, and in a structure, that is by no means absolutely mandatory, but which has a certain logic to it. The logic tends to start with the divine perfections that are the most fundamental to our understanding of God’s existence, of what God is, and of who God is. The perfections most foundational for our apprehension of God tend to come first. Even if these perfections of God are sometimes very abstractly stated, it works best to lay them down first and then to build the structure of understanding onto them: God’s spirituality and simplicity; his immutability, unity, infinity, and greatness. We could go on at length enumerating these foundational perfections, and I want to stress that there’s no such thing as a complete list of the divine…

The biblical theology of glory provides an embarrassment of riches. To expound this doctrine, we could proceed simply by concordance-drill, reciting some key passages on divine glory, putting them in a meaningful salvation-historical sequence, and tracing the theme of glory all the way from the doctrine of God through creation to redemption. Let me just do my top 7, to show you how rich and satisfying the whole exercise would be:  Isaiah 42:8 “I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.”   Isaiah 43:7 “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Hebrews 1:3  He is the radiance of the glory of God and the…

[Preached Sunday, February 5 at Grace Evangelical Free Church of La Mirada] Learn A Lesson From A Dirty Scoundrel (Fred Sanders).mov from Grace EV Free on Vimeo. Hi friends. So I entitled this sermon, “Learn a Lesson from a Dirty Scoundrel,” and then it occurred to me that as I’m walking up here, you might be thinking, “Aha, so this must be that dirty scoundrel we’re going to learn the lesson from!” Well, that at least wasn’t the point of the title. The point of the title is this: We’re going to explore this parable this morning, and I just want you to remember very clearly that the main character is a bad dude. He is a rascal. That’s not just my spin on it, or just my interpretation, it’s what Jesus explicitly says in the text: Just glance at Luke 16, verse 8…

In Bavinck’s RD II:151, while talking about divine independence, he gives a wonderful list of Greek terms that develop divine independence by putting the prefix auto- onto a divine attribute: autogennetos, autophues, autousios, autotheos, autophos, and so on. It’s fantastic: a richer catalog than I’ve found in any single Greek patristic source –not even in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus put together– it seems to be gathered from several. Look for the list in this screencap, down beside the little grabby hand: Notice that the list is in quotation marks. The footnote says “Cf. J.C. Suicerus, Thesaurus ecclesiasticus, s.v. ‘αὐταρκεία.’” So that must be the list maker, the person who trawled through Greek patristic texts and gathered in this wonderful usage. Sounds like a guy I’d like to party with, so let’s look him up! “Suicerus” is Johann Caspar Suicer (that is, Schweitzer: PRDL…

The heart of William Burt Pope’s Christology is his effort “to concentrate attention on the unity and the indivisibility of the Saviour’s Incarnate Person.” His Christology, in other words, is rightly entitled The Person of Christ, because for Pope, all the most important things that need to be said about Christ are statements about his person. More technically we could say Pope’s focus is on the single hypostasis of the hypostatic union; more devotionally we could say Pope looks to Jesus, not to the things that support him or surround him or are accomplished by him, but always relentlessly to Him, Him, Him. Pope wrote a great deal, including of course a three-volume systematic theology, but it’s interesting that he only produced one monograph devoted to a single doctrine. That doctrine was Christology, and that Christology was uniquely centered on The Person of Christ….

When you consider the Trinitarian background of the incarnation, you usually summon to mind one of two possible mental frameworks. First is the “one God in three persons” framework, which involves thinking of how each person of the Trinity is fully God, but none are each other. The second option is the “Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit” option, which involves thinking of how each person of the Trinity is related to each other through irreversible relations of origin. I’ve nicknamed these two styles of trinitarian schemas the Quicunquan and Nicene styles, after the two creeds that best encapsulate them (Quicunquan being an intentionally odd term for the so-called Athanasian Creed, drawing on its first word in Latin). Here are diagrams: The two frameworks do not contradict each other, any more than the creeds they are named for do. You need to…

William Burt Pope starts his book on The Person of Christ (2nd ed., 1875) with a few observations about terminology. Specifically, he notes a certain “adjustment of our phraseology” which takes place in Christology, but also more broadly in theology. Pope considers the task of formulating doctrines to be strictly subordinate to the task of understanding Scripture’s own formulations. He rather laments our need to come up with new language to speak theologically, and wishes it were possible to simply say exactly what Scripture says. But then again, as long as we are coining theological language, we should make sure it’s well-coined. And when it is, Pope is willing to make startlingly high claims for the power of theology. So it’s hard to say if Pope has a low view or a high view of theological terminology. Here’s how he sets up the discussion:…

Oliver Crisp, Katya Covrett, and I got together and planned a swell theology conference on the doctrine of the church, and we’ve been trying to actually convene it for a couple of years now. Global events transpired, of course. But the Los Angeles Theology Conference is coming back, with a great set of speakers and our traditional LATC conference format: publisher exhibits on site, refreshments on hand, and ample time for conferring theologically. We’ve moved from January to March, and have spread into a third day, but otherwise the successful LATC format is unchanged. The official LATC site is here; the Eventbrite registration page is open for ticket purchases here; and the detailed schedule is posted (drumroll please) right here: Weds Mar 15: 7 pm, Plenary 1: Natalie Carnes, “Nature, Culture, Church: Reconsidering the Church-World Divide” Thurs Mar 16: 9am, Plenary 2: Millard J….

Some Sweeping Gestures Both books take place under the sway of one dominant image made known by revelation: The Lord who is above all things, seated on the throne of divine authority, in the form of a human. Both books are somewhat oblique in their account of this dominant image: Ezekiel testifies that the vision is a likeness having an appearance of what looked like one on a throne, but is highly selective in his visual description. Paul hints at the image of the enthroned Christ (“in Christ in the heavenly places,” 1:3) in his opening remarks, before finally making his theme explicit in the prayer that his readers would be given supernatural knowledge of the power that placed Christ on that throne. Both books share a rhetorical strategy of stunning the reader with an opening jolt of complex and comprehensive spiritual realities. Words…

Remarks on R. B. Jamieson’s The Paradox of Sonship (IVP Academic, 2021) Regarding this book I have much to say, having been enthusiastic about the idea of it since Bobby Jamieson described it to me as early as 2016, and having been enthusiastic about the first version of the manuscript since I glimpsed it in 2017. I hope the time is near when we can begin describing not only the book’s merits but also its influence, which deserves to be substantial. In addition to being a virtuoso individual performance and a close reading of this one particular and rather unique New Testament book, The Paradox of Sonship also represents a style of reading that holds great promise for biblical and theological studies at large. I use the phrase “style of reading” rather than the imposing word “methodology” advisedly, since I am distantly aware of…

Augustine raises the question in a couple of places:1 Is it better to say that the Son was eternally generated, or is eternally generated? Hilary of Poitiers also raises the same question.2 It draws the attention of Peter Lombard, who gives it an entire chapter in his Sentences,3 where he resolves it in dialogue with Augustine and Hilary, but also Gregory the Great, Chrysostom, and Origen. The treatment is typically Lombardian, concerned to read Scripture accurately and also to reconcile apparent contradictions in what has been said “among the doctors.” Lombard’s summary view: “Let us say that the Son was born from the Father before all time, and is forever being born from the Father, but more fittingly, is forever born.” (p. 57) “Was born” has the advantage of using the past tense to indicate a perfectly accomplished eternal act; “is forever being born”…

I just picked up the first-ever English translation of Bernardinus de Moor’s eighteenth-century work on the Trinity. Running 382 pages and costing $50 hardcover, it’s a good book and I’m glad to have it. Here’s why. De Moor (1709-1780) was a theology professor at Leiden from 1745 until his death, and his theological project was essentially conservative. He liked the Protestant Orthodox system and intended to preserve and extend it. Willem J. van Asselt said “de Moor classified and combined material from the Reformed dogmatics produced by his predecessors at Utrecht and Leiden into a whole.” In particular, de Moor’s major production took the form of an expansive running commentary on a rather concise theological system by one of his teachers,  Johannes à Marck. So de Moor’s multivolume theology has the title Continuous Commentary on Johannes à Marck’s Compendium of Didactico-Elenctic Christian Theology (Commentarius…

“What was actually said by this formula from Chalcedon?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer put this rhetorical question to his students in Berlin in 1933.1 Then, of course, he went on to answer it in lecture form. Rehearsing the four fearful negatives of the Definition (unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably) he explained the errors excluded by them. He emphasized that Chalcedon seemed to forbid all the possible combinations of “nature” and “person,” almost as if its framers had invoked these categories and enshrined them in negatives just to show that nothing positive could be said about them, or at least nothing beyond the boundaries just drawn: What is being said with the Chalcedonian formula is this: that all options for thinking of all this together and in juxtaposition are represented as impossible and forbidden options. Then there is no longer any positive assertion that can be made about…

In his book Trinity in Aquinas (Sapientia Press, 2003), Gilles Emery OP has a deft explanation of how “relation” works in Thomas’ account of the Trinity in the Summa Theologiae. I read it quickly (it’s on p. 141), grasped what he was saying in a general way, and read on. But then Emery kept coming back to this little 200-word explanation in subsequent pages. He’d make a point, and then refer to “the double aspect of relation that we exposed earlier” (158). When I tried to draw “the double aspect of relation” out of my memory, I found I wasn’t exactly quick to the task. So here’s the key section of the key paragraph, typed in and broken up into smaller units: The analysis of relation is founded on the Aristotelian doctrine of categories or predicaments. For St. Thomas, real relations in our world…

When did the word “role” come to seem like an obvious word to use to describe how the three persons of the Trinity are distinct from each other? I hear it all the time from Christians who are serious about being Biblical in their thinking, but who haven’t had the kind of theological training that would direct them to use more traditional terms (persons in relation, hypostases, etc.). They reach for a word in their current vocabulary whose ordinary usage seems helpful. When they do this, “role” seems self-evident. But when did it start to seem that way? It’s a hard question to research because it’s a question about popular usage more than about professional theological writing. So I’m going to start this blog post with the earliest instance I’ve run across, and I’ll silently update the post whenever I find better or older…

The Son of God, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, took human nature to himself, died, and rose again. Who is the person who did all this, this person we are talking about? Jesus Christ. But if you say a few more sentences about him, you quickly find yourself needing to use names or titles that make distinctions. You need to pick out this one same person, but from different perspectives, or in different aspects, or at different moments. For example, if you say “let me tell you something Jesus did,” your listeners will expect, perfectly reasonably, to hear about something the son of Mary did. If you then go on to say, “he became incarnate,” they will have a moment of disorientation. Wasn’t he not yet the son of Mary, but about to become the son of Mary? Similarly, we can easily get…

The Son of God is homoousios, consubstantial, with the Father. This consubstantiality means that there is one divine nature, and that Father and Son are persons who both have that numerically same nature. When the Son takes human nature into personal union with himself, he assumes another nature while of course retaining his divine nature. So the two natures are united in him, that is, in his person (hypostasis). We can say that in the incarnation he is consubstantial with humanity. In fact, we did say this, in the early centuries during which the councils were expounding Christian doctrine. Christ is consubstantial with his Father divinely, and consubstantial with his mother humanly. The result has been called double consubstantiality, and while it’s a lot of syllables, it is a beautiful doctrine, well suited for teaching memorably. It enables us to speak of the two…