Journal Articles & Book Chapters

In recent years, there has been a change in the way theologians talk the doctrine of God. One way to describe the change would be to say that classical theism has made a comeback. By “classical…

When theologians take up the crucial catechetical task of teaching about Jesus Christ, what principle of ordering should they follow? Which sub-topics within this rich field should be taught first, which ones postponed until later, and under what overarching categories should they all be gathered? In this article, I would like to commend one particular organizational schema for introducing Christology to students, and then demonstrate the advantages of that schema by offering a brief example of its key points. The method I recommend is this: follow the leading ideas of the ecumenical councils of the early church and then support them with biblical argumentation. Conciliar Christology is thus the framework for teaching Christology, with biblical material brought in to fill it out.

In a previous chapter, I argued in favor of a localist approach to the work of systematic theology, and in particular to claim that such a thing was desirable in this particular locale, California. That chapter…

In various ways, much of the best new work on the doctrine of the Trinity can be considered counter-revolutionary. Nicaea was more doctrinally holistic than merely a refutation of one heresy; Augustine was not merely as bad Colin Gunton alleged; Aquinas did not sever the treatise on the One God from the treatise on the Trinity; De Régnon was overly schematic with his East-West distinction, and so on. The new wave of counter-revolutionary trinitarianism begs to differ, and is finding ways to leap over the orthodoxies of the recent past to get back in touch with a longer narrative that makes more sense. Steve Holmes’s book is the feistiest of this new wave of counter-revolutionary trinitarianism, and serves as a kind of clearing house for all the recent moves, stating them more succinctly, more coherently, and more explosively.

Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel edited a wonderful book called Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics: A Guide for Evangelicals (IVP, 2013). J.I. Packer called the book “an absolutely unrivaled mapping by experts of the whole church’s…

At the 2012 ETS national conference, Mark Bowald emceed a set of critical interactions with Kevin Vanhoozer’s major work on the doctrine of God, Remythologizing Theology. These essays, by John Franke, Steve Wellum, Oliver Crisp, and…

One of the chief obligations laid upon trinitarian theology in our time is that it renders the doctrine of the Trinity with unprecedented clarity as a biblical doctrine, or, to speak more precisely, as a doctrine that is in the Bible. If there ever was a time when theology could afford to hurry past this task, with an impatient wave of the hand in the general direction of scripture, that time is not now.

Abstract: The doctrine of the Trinity has, in the past couple of decades, reclaimed its central place in Christian God talk. Theologians are now using it to render every doctrine more explicitly Christian, and to sharpen…

There is a noteworthy line in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 16, where the poet extols the Son of God for freely sharing the benefits of salvation while at the same time retaining “his jointure in the…