Mark 8:7 says that Jesus “blessed” the fish before distributing them to the 4000. As my colleague Toby Sumpter points out, this is the verb of the sea creatures in Gen 1:27, where Yahweh tells them to be fruitful and multiply. Jesus too, the Creator incarnate, blesses fish to multiply in order to feed his Gentile crowd. Read more
INTRODUCTION As Jesus and His three disciples descend from the mountain, they find the other disciples struggling to help a demon-possessed boy. The disciples fail. Jesus is the greater Elisha, and His disciples are like Elisha’s bumbling sidekick, Gehazi. They still lack even a mustard seed of faith (v. 20). THE TEXT “Now as they came down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, saying, ‘Tell the vision to no one until the Son of Man is risen from the dead.’... Read more
Jesus told Peter, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself.” Self-denial is a basic demand of discipleship. We can’t follow Jesus if we don’t do it. Jesus is not talking about afflicting our bodies with fasting and flagellation, but about something more fundamental. Self-denial means giving up our will and submitting ourselves to the will of another. Self-denial means bending our plans, hopes, dreams, actions to Jesus and to His Father. (more…) Read more
Gregory of Nyssa discerned that Arianism erred because it “defines God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divine eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find the mark of deity in endless futurity . . . ; let them guide their thinking by what is to come and is real in hope rather than by what is past and old.” Gregory is here overturning the tragic... Read more
My two favorite paragraphs from Jenson’s Triune Identity : “‘Out of the being of the Father’ affirms just that origin of Christ within God’s own self which Arius most feared. The phrase says that the Son is not an entity originated outside God by God’s externally directed choice, that he is not in any sense a creature. And it says that there is differentiation within God, that the relation to the Son is an ‘internal relation’ in the Father, a... Read more
Behind Arianism, Jenson sees the typical Hellenistic desire to escape time: “what moves Arius is the late-Hellenic need to escape time, to become utterly dominant. If we are to be saved, Arius supposes, there must be some reality entirely uninvolved with time, which has no origin of any sort and whose continuity is undifferentiated and uninterrupted. Just so, it is because Christ is involved with time that he will not do as really God: ‘How can the Logos be God,... Read more
Jenson summarizes several thread of Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology: “Tertullian’s interpretation of God was far more biblical than that of the Apologists. He explicitly distinguished the living personal God of Scripture from both the numina of the old Roman religion and the abstract deity of Hellenism . . . . So far from using ‘God’ as an adjective, he took it for a proper name. And despite formal adherence to the negative theology and lapses into more conventional caution, at the... Read more
The basic structure of redemptive history is an exitus and reditus structure, going out from God and return to Him. For Thomas, Emery says, “The Trinitarian processions provide the doctrinal foundation of the exitus-reditus structure of the world and of history.” He quotes Thomas as saying, “Just as the procession of persons is the reason of the production of creatures by the first principle, so too this same process is the reason for the return of creatures to their end;... Read more
RPC Hanson writes, “At the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their opponents was defised in order to find a way of envisaging the Christian doctrine of God which would make it possible to be faithful to the Biblical witness to a God who suffers. This was to be achieved by conceiving of a lesser God as reduced divinity who... Read more
Many writers of the English Enlightenment attempted to formulate an original monotheistic “natural religion” that could be contrasted with the “positive religion” of Christianity. Priests suppressed the true natural religion that was maintained in secret by philosophers until they could teach it openly. The form of this historical account is similar in a number of respects to patristic arguments against pagan belief. Justin, for instance, argues that the Greek philosophers got all their good ideas from the earlier revelation of... Read more
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