The last few years, I’ve been reading and writing on ecclesiology. It’s a funny topic, one capable of being at one moment dull, at the next incendiary. There’s plenty out there that merely re-hashes standard material and parses terms ever more finely. Here, though, are a few of my favorite reads – an idiosyncratic list, [...]

In the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, Dan Akroyd deadpans: “We’re on a mission from God.” He and his partner are in the process of putting their band back together and are enlisting an old bandmate, and Akroyd”s character flatly insists that the divine origin of their project is sufficient warrant for the man to [...]

Yesterday Joe and I were driving to Sports Authority in Cerritos. In the middle of catching one another up on our lives, he took a conversational detour to ask what I thought about Israel. It’s partly a political question, partly a spiritual one; it concerns at once Scripture, revelation, Jesus, the church and, of course, [...]

What is grace? A word used so indiscriminately in casual conversation, and often enough in theological exposition, can threaten to lose all significance. Here is a simple, but comprehensive definition: Grace is the effective presence of the triune God to pardon and empower. Let’s unpack that a bit. First, grace is effective presence. That is, [...]

Benjamin Warfield once wrote that ‘the the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.’ Warfield captures both the centrality of Augustine to the faith of the Reformers and the contested interpretation of the bishop of Hippo. These same two features appear in Karl [...]

Oswald Bayer has written a really quite wonderful book, Theology the Lutheran Way, in which he makes much of Martin Luther’s sense that the theologian is one who interprets – and is interpreted by – Scripture. All Christians are theologians, according to Luther, and to be a theologian is simply to be one who hears [...]

Christ is risen! This is the day for which we’ve been waiting these long Lenten weeks. We have been fasting and praying and lamenting, thinking so much – many of us would say far too much – about our sin and suffering and death. We entered into Lent with a certain somber joy, but that [...]