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The Nicene Creed (381) calls the Son “begotten from the Father” and also “same-in-substance with the Father.” These two phrases can be treated as two claims that are distinct from each other, or perhaps as two ways of arguing to the same conclusion (the full deity of the Son). It can be analytically helpful to isolate them this way. To claim that the Son is begotten from the Father is to make a claim about his hypostatic relation to his necessary principle or origin. But to claim that he is same-in-substance is to make a claim about his substance. The former is eternal generation, the latter consubstantiality. Both converge on the judgement that the Son is God, but they are different paths to that insight. It might especially be helpful to distinguish these things if you were inclined to affirm one but not both….

One of the objections we sometimes hear to the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is that it seems like a story. To say that God the Father begat, begets, or has begotten God the Son sounds like saying “once upon a time, these events happened.” It’s a good objection, especially when both parties of the discussion agree in advance that we shouldn’t be telling any origin stories about how God came to be God. A God with a narrative of how he came to be God cannot be God. There are several possible replies to the story objection. Before I suggest the one that I think is most effective, let me list four others. The first is to insist that this is exactly why we always put the adjective “eternal” in front of the noun “generation” when we talk about this…

Thomas Manton (1620–1677) had a lot to say about human blessedness. His megamassive three-volume commentary on Psalm 119 takes its keynote from that opening beatitude, “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” But his doctrine of human blessedness is firmly based on a doctrine of divine blessedness, the blessedness of God, which he makes explicit when he turns his attention to Ps 119:12, “Blessed art Thou, O LORD, teach me thy statues.” As a preacher, Manton was reliably focused on letting his text pose the key questions. Accordingly, what he is most interested in Ps 119:12 is what the first statement has to do with the second: What is it about God’s blessedness that leads the Psalmist to ask God, “teach me thy statutes?” It’s a good question. And it opens up into a rather finely elaborated…

Erasmus’ first best-seller was his Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier. He wrote it in 1501 and published it in 1503, safely before the Reformation began rumbling. It was apparently universally popular in a divisive era, but as the world around it changed, it became a special favorite of Protestants for some time. Stylistically, one thing that made the book unique was its flowing, uninterrupted, discursive style. Erasmus used an easy Latin style, and the book was translated into multiple vernacular languages. As someone who has assigned this book for college students to read, I can testify that modern readers do not find the flowing style as attractive as early modern readers did. In fact, it kind of drives them crazy. Perhaps to compensate for the free-flowing style, Erasmus introduces some structure into the work: he offers twenty-two (mostly) numbered rules, of unequal…

Athanasius’ In Illud Omnia is fantastic. Too bad it got stuck w/no context & a non-title. Personally, I refer to it as “What the Son Has from the Father.” Here’s a thread on what I saw as I worked through it recently. It’s just about 2k words long; may have been a sermon; may be from 342. There’s a wooden ET in NPNF2, 4:87-90 by Newman and/or Robertson; Greek in PG 25:208-20. Athanasius starts by reading Matt. 11:27, “All things have been given over to me by my Father,” & then takes up the question of what the Son receives from the Father. Arians might pounce on the text as proof that the Son used to lack all things, but that once upon a time the Father gave them over to him. They take it as a kind of origin story of how the…

To what shall we compare God? This is a question about analogies. And we shouldn’t treat God as an inert entity about which we can only know by way of analogies. To do so misses the “agential idiom” which alone is appropriate to God, since God acts, and makes himself known. So if we know God by way of how he represents himself in acts, we could say God is like what God does. But of course it would be even better to say that what God does is like God. Still better: Those actions of God in which God intentionally makes himself known are like God. The main divine actions in which God intentionally makes himself known are the Father sending the Son and the Holy Spirit. These sendings show the character of God’s eternal life. So God is like what God does…

I was invited to give the charge to the graduates at the 56th annual commencement service for the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Here’s the main point I made. It’s tailored to laypeople in an urban setting, but it concerns the spiritual value of Biblical and theological education more generally. Turn with me to Ephesians 4, verses 20 to 21. 20 But you did not learn Christ in this way,21 If indeed you have heard himand have been taught in him,just as truth is in Jesus. Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus about “the way they learned Christ.” And here I am, speaking to the graduates of Los Angeles Bible Training School about “the way you learned Christ.” You have learned Christ, heard him, and been taught in him, just as truth is in Jesus. So I want to congratulate you. You…

Gregory of Nazianzus has a very special way of using the phrase, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” in his Five Theological Orations. The phrase is of course from the end of Matthew’s Gospel, where the risen Jesus gives the command to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in this name. Nazianzus’ Five Theological Orations are a classic work of patristic trinitarian theology, immensely influential and justly famous for their rhetorical polish and power. So it is interesting to see how Nazianzus handles the baptismal name in this work. He uses it exactly seven times. If you’ve got the SVS edition of the Five Orations, you can find the passages on pages 37, 70, 118, 123, 138, 141, and 143. In each occurrence, he uses the formula in a climactic fashion, or at a summative moment in his argument. It has,…

In Leo the Great’s first Pentecost sermon from the year 444 (Sermon 75), he graphically narrates the details of the advent of the Holy Spirit: wind, flame, foreign speech, and all. The imagery is all quite clear, direct, Biblical, and concrete. And then in the second sermon, he draws back for a moment, in order to clarify for his hearers that all this direct speech about wind and fire should not be misunderstood: the Holy Spirit is not the wind, not the fire, not any physical or experiential phenomenon. The Holy Spirit is God. And the easiest way to lift up Christian minds to confess this is to set the Spirit in Trinitarian context. So, apologizing to his regular audience for covering theological basics, he takes a moment to rehearse the rules by which the mind can follow Trinitarian teaching. And he is especially…

I can easily sing “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” w/a clear theological conscience. Always have. What do I do when I get to the line, “the Father turns his face away?” I instinctively interpret it charitably, in the high-trust environment of my local church. Does this line from the 1990 song drift too close to suggesting that Father & Son are separable, at odds, broken up? A bit. But if I’ve heard good trinitarian theology at church, I know in advance not to hear the line that way. The line wraps trinitarian language (Father-Son) around a biblical image (turning away a face) in order to interpret the moment of crucifixion. All in the context of setting forth the cross as the effective communication of the Father’s love via the Son. Here’s the problem: If you’ve recently heard “broken Trinity” teaching, or Father-angry/Son-merciful…

I recently led a discussion on Jürgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Here are some notes I took as I re-read the assigned text, the 90-page-long chapter six (also bearing the title “The ‘Crucified God’”), and some reflections that came to me after class time. Reading the book in 2022, it definitely feels fifty years old. The German first edition was 1972, and the way Moltmann writes about the “death of God” theology as a current event, the way he interacts with certain forms of existentialism, and the footnotes to only the very early positions of contemporaries like Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel mark this as coming from the early seventies. It was his second real book, after only Theology of Hope. (“Back when I was reading Moltmann in the early nineties, it…

A Biblical Path to the Triune God (CUA Press, 2022): Denis Farkasfalvy (Hungarian-born Cistercian who taught in Texas) finished this 100-pager just before dying in May 2020 (at age 83, of COVID). It’s good stuff. Almost a very long article spanning NT studies into early Christian doctrine. The big idea is to take Jesus’ statement that nobody knows the Son except the Father, or vice versa, as the starting point for the doctrine of the Trinity. Farkasfalvy emphasizes the historical-critical defensibility of this: a well-attested claim of Jesus’ self-understanding. He calls the passage (Matt 11/Luke 10) “the Synoptic Jubilation.” In it he sees the “reproductive metaphor” of messianic thought (“Son of David/of God”) transposed into epistemic terms (mutual knowledge). Interesting link to God showing Peter what flesh & blood could not have done, & Paul saying it pleased God to reveal his Son in…

In his excellent discussion of the Holy Spirit (in volume one of his four-volume The Christian’s Reasonable Service, pages 166-174), Wilhelmus à Brakel places special emphasis on how the Spirit’s name displays his character. There is something breathy about his person and work; his name shows this. A teacher like Brakel, with his keen eye for how to organize, simplify, and apply Christian doctrine, is especially well suited to the task of teaching deep pneumatology in this memorable way. Scripture calls the third person of the Trinity ruach and pneuma, and Brakel admits that in different contexts, these words can mean wind (John 3:8), angels (Heb 1:14), the human soul (Eccl. 12:7), and the motions or attitudes of the soul (Gal 6:1) (166). But when used of this particular person of the Trinity, there are three good reasons: “Because it is His personal property…

In Preface to Paradise Lost Chapter 10, “Milton and Augustine,” C.S. Lewis summarizes, for the instruction of modern literary readers of Milton, just how thoroughly Augustinian Milton is being in most of his epic. Explaining Augustine’s view of the origin of evil (which he mentions is also more or less that of the universal church), Lewis says: What we call bad things are good things perverted (De Civ. Dei, xiv, 11). This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God (ibid, xiv, 11), and wishes to exist ‘on its own’ (esse in semet ipso, xiv, 13). This is the sin of Pride. This is excellent: “more interested in itself than in God.” It cuts straight into the reader’s thought-life, still talking about Milton’s Satan and Augustine’s story of the world, but suddenly also implicating the everyday movements of…

I’m giving the 2022 Norton Lectures at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (I’ll update this page with links as they become available.) The title I’ve chosen for the suite of three lectures is “Union with Christ, Systematically Considered.” Series Description: Nobody can do full justice to the doctrine of union with Christ, but the most insightful treatments of the theme throughout Christian history have in common a certain centripetal energy, a center-seeking tendency that strives to recognize this doctrine as soteriologically fundamental. My goal in these lectures is to join that movement by examining how the truth of union with Christ shapes not only the doctrine of salvation in the narrower sense (including the ordo salutis), but also the overall Christian creed and even the basic forms of Scripture itself. Though necessarily only accomplishing an initial approach, these lectures are an effort to place the…

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 a widespread opinion that there is a twofold trinitarian theology’, Greek and Latin. …It will be worth the effort to consider this matter and to evaluate the main foundations of this opinion.” Dalmau identifies Théodore de Regnon as the most influential proponent of this view, whose main points he summarizes thus: Nature vs. Person: The former [the Latins] consider the nature first, afterwards the person; on the contrary, the Greeks fix their attention on the person first, afterwards on the nature; that is, the Latins consider the nature directly and the person indirectly, while the Greeks consider the person directly and the nature indirectly. For the Latins a person is “personified nature”; for the…