Featured Essay
It is a truth universally acknowledged (among theologians, or at least most of them), that a Christian in possession of a Pietistic spirituality, must be in want of a social ethic. Pietists, those champions of heart religion, those prototypes of today’s experience-driven religion, were so heavenly-minded they could not possibly have been of any earthly good. If they thought a...
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Today (June 12) is the birthday of Charles L. Feinberg (1909-1995), the Old Testament scholar whose name and scholarly reputation were synonymous with Biola's. Feinberg left a rich legacy of biblical studies (see below), especially in the form of careful biblical expositions shaped by his Hebrew-Christian consciousness and his dispensational commitments.
I don't see much ab...
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Hey, according to the liturgical calendar, it's Pentecost Sunday! Quick, think about the Holy Spirit. Here are some of my favorite books on pneumatology, off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm leaving out a few even better books, but there's an embarrassment of riches on this topic.
Athanasius, Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit (4th c.). Athanasius wrote voluminously on ...
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H.C.G. Moule was the Bishop of Durham just after the death of Queen Victoria. He wrote wonderful commentaries on many books of the New Testament, but never did a full-length treatment of Galatians. What he did publish was an itty-bitty 60-page devotional book called The Cross and the Spirit: Meditations on the Epistle to the Galatians, developing the leading ideas of the doctr...
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Earlier this year I had a one-page piece about the Trinity in Biola Magazine. My goal was to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine, and my hook was to begin by conceding that all the elements of trinitarianism are not all brought together in one verse, and then to show how that's actually an advantage. The doctrine of the Trinity is presented diffusely i...
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In a 1958 essay on the future of the Methodist tradition, E. Gordon Rupp insists, with all humility and caution, there there is "something needing to be said" in modern theology and Christian witness, "which our Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Anglican friends are not saying." What he has in mind is the aggressive, culture-transforming edge of John Wesley's way of preachi...
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I get to spend the middle part of the summer studying Galatians for a class I'm co-teaching in Cambridge. I don't have time to undertake a major memorization program (like learning the whole book by heart), but here are the verses I think will be best to commit to memory. I chose these because they pack the most ideas into the smallest spaces, because they are important for tr...
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Richard Hays (from his 2001 intro to the 2nd ed. of Faith of Jesus Christ) gives some great advice on how to read Paul: "Paul, the missionary preacher, is at least as much a poet as he is a theologian." And Hays doesn't just mean in the mind-blowing passages like Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 13. No, "throughout his writings, Paul's language sparkles with the veiled energy of met...
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Today (June 2) is the day King Aethelbert of Kent was baptized into the Christian faith by Augustine of Canterbury in the year 597.
Bede tells us that Aethelbert "was the third English king to become High-King (Bretwalda) of all the provinces south of the river Humber, but he was the first to enter the kingdom of heaven." So for anybody who wants to trace British Christian...
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The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge was, and still is, a Bible reference work first published around 1830, created by the London publisher Samuel Bagster (1772-1851).
It is a deluxe set of cross-references. That is, the TSK consists entirely of a book-length listing of cross-references, showing only the chapter and verse citations, without any accompanying text. About the ...
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Featured Essay
In 1735, John Wesley published an abridgment of Thomas a Kempis' classic 1441 book The Imitation of Christ. Wesley's edition was called The Christian's Pattern. By way of introduction, Wesley gave his readers a short set of directions "concerning the manner of reading this (or any other) religious treatise." The instructions were not quite of Wesley's own devising; he translat...
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(I wrote this piece a year ago, and since then, there has been a reconciliation with the friend in question, though this friend lives now a half a world away. I publish it as it is)
there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
As I write this piece I am contemplating a copy of the San Damiano icon of our Lord’s crucif...
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