The Blessing of Trinity Sunday

Redeemer church exterior

I got invited to preach on Trinity Sunday (May 26, 2013) at Redeemer Church of La Mirada, a church just down the road a bit,  where a lot of my friends and colleagues attend. The sermon is available for download at their website for the time being, and I’ll see if I can figure out [...]

“You Are Opening the Doors to Every Demon” (Barth circa 1935)

Barth about 50 maybe

Around 1935, Karl Barth developed a style of speaking and writing that cut through a lot of atmospheric confusion and obfuscation. He found this new tone of voice for two reasons:  first, it was 1935, and the crisis in Germany was becoming impossible for the world to keep ignoring. As a (Swiss) professor teaching in Germany [...]

Karl Barth: The Word of God and Theology

Karl Barth, The Word of God and Theology, trans. Amy Marga (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 242 pp. (review copy courtesy of T&T Clark) Annie Dillard once wrote that she did ‘not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? [...]

12th Annual G. Campbell Morgan Lectures Online

Jenson screencap

For twelve years, the Torrey Honors Institute has organized the G. Campbell Morgan Theology Lectures, a ten-hour overview of the major doctrines of systematic theology. It’s designed for Torrey freshmen and sophomores who have been immersed in primary texts from the history of theology: Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and even a few authors whose names [...]

Prayer for the Class of 2013

A prayer given at Torrey graduation, May 24, 2013. It includes a little unfootnoted Calvin, a little Barth, a little Lincoln, a little Psalm 98, and is based on a prayer I prayed ten years ago for another graduating class. O Sovereign God, your story is bigger than ours. We come to you today with [...]

Benediction for LABTS Graduation 2013

The Los Angeles Bible Training School graduated another class of Bible students last week. These graduates have earned a Bible certificate that equips them to carry on their ministries with greater depth and more training, based on a systematic study of the Scriptures. The commencement speaker was Dr. Clint Arnold, dean of Talbot School of [...]

Graduation Prayers

“Write prayers and burn them,” advised P.T. Forsyth in The Soul of Prayer.  Why write them? Because it gives you a chance to be more careful in choosing words, in shaping the overall prayer with craft and coherence. Most of the praying that we do throughout a work day is either unscripted and spontaneous, or [...]

Doubting 101

questions

This week Fred Sanders posted a link to a meditation on Barth and the experience of doubt in the life of a Christian, and especially of a theologian. The article deals with two forms of Christian doubt, one innocuous, one dangerous, but both negative. While this post rightly identifies two ways doubt can go wrong, [...]

Divine Education

hall authority

One of our semesters at Torrey Honors Institute is called On Learning and Knowledge, and it is an excellent thematic investigation of epistemology, philosophy of education, and even pedagogy, among other things. Our juniors in this course read Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Frederick Douglass and John Henry Newman, along with Descartes, Pascal, Locke, [...]

Whither Trinitarian Theology (Holmes pt. 3)

holmes quest

Fred Sanders and Matt Jenson finish their series of posts on Steve Holmes’ new Trinity book (the others are here and here) with a discussion about his overall project and what it suggests for trinitarian theology.  Jenson: Holmes steers awfully close to despair at the end of his book, Fred. On the last page, after a [...]