Featured Essay
Essays
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz (1943-2012)
This past weekend (on May 13), the hispanic feminist liberation theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz died. Is “hispanic feminist liberation theologian” too much of a mouthful? She thought so, too. Each of those adjectives is accurate as a description of her work, but all strung together like that, they sounded like a tangle of disparate threads.… [Continue Reading]
Imitating Jesus’ Dependence on the Father and the Spirit
Klaus Issler‘s new book Living into the Life of Jesus: The Formation of Christian Character (IVP, 2012) is a unique product. It looks like a spiritual formation book, and it is. From its green cover with a picture of a lone figure walking down a path into a gauzy landscape, you can tell it’s going… [Continue Reading]
The Ascension: Christ Among Us, Christ Above Us
My awesome little Baptist church follows the church calendar (Yes, that’s right.), and this Thursday is Ascension Day. After preaching at our midweek service last year, I became the church’s unofficial Ascension nut, and I’m getting ready to preach again. It’ll be our third sermon on the Ascension, each with a different approach, and between the… [Continue Reading]
How to Teach Salvation: Three Mysteries
There are three great mysteries in Christian theology: the Trinity, the incarnation, and the atonement. These three mysteries are all mysteries of unity: The mystery of the Trinity is how the three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are the one, only God. The mystery of the incarnation is how the divine nature is united to… [Continue Reading]
Metathon 2012 – Dante’s Inferno Dr. Geier: “It’s interesting that Satan’s uninteresting.”
The Metathon ended Sunday night, complete with its traditional climactic cake. Lots of us stayed up an hour or two after eating to follow loose conversational threads from the last few days (“So what did you mean that knowledge is an image?”) or to play with our newly-minted inside jokes. It’s amazing the sort of work… [Continue Reading]
The Myth of Trinitarian Marginalization
It’s a commonplace in contemporary theology to say that the doctrine of the Trinity was marginalized in the modern period, until it was recovered by Barth and Rahner. The doctrine was kept around, so the story goes, but it didn’t matter to theologians, and didn’t do any real work that made a difference. That’s the… [Continue Reading]
Proving the Resurrection
I’ll admit it. I’m skeptical about attempts to prove the existence of God or, indeed, any of the major tenets of the Christian faith. Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped that ‘the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.’ I’m not sure I’d even go that far. There’s a lot… [Continue Reading]
Reflections on the History of Torrey—Ep. 1
As one chapter in the history of the Torrey Honors Institute closes and another opens, some of the minds responsible for its birth reflect on the development of the program. Join Dr. John Mark Reynolds, Dr. Paul Spears, and Dr. Fred Sanders as they discuss the origins and future of the Torrey Honors Institute. Click… [Continue Reading]
Metathon 2012 – Dante’s Inferno
Photo credit: Shannon Leith. Check out her website. She’s incredible. After about a decade of close readings, late-night discussions, pizza, cake, and camaraderie, the Torrey Metathon is in the last year of its current iteration, and we’re going out in style–with Dante for company. If you’ve never been to a Metathon, the formula’s pretty simple: get… [Continue Reading]
Follow Patheos
Evangelical: