This Saturday there’s a great conference for men in Los Angeles. It’s organized by the Los Angeles Bible Training School, which I believe is the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles. The conference theme is “Behold Your God!” because all the teaching will be about the character and attributes of God.  Often, a conference for men will focus on topics uniquely relevant to men (a previous LABTS conference was on sexual purity, and resulted in the publication of a book... Read more

The first annual Los Angeles Theology Conference was a big success, and now we are moving forward with plans for future LATC meetings. Here are our topics for the next four years: 2014: Trinity 2015: Atonement 2016: Pneumatology 2017: Dogmatics I’ll announce more details about each of those themes in due course. But we can already publicize the plenary speakers who have agreed to present at the 2014 Trinity conference: Lewis Ayres, Bede Professor in Catholic Theology, Durham University; author of... Read more

Here is the welcome note published in the conference program for today’s theology conference: Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Los Angeles Theology Conference, an annual gathering devoted to the discussion of major doctrines of systematic theology. Thank you for joining us in this first year, when we take up the central doctrine of christology. A theology conference is too serious and too scholarly a thing to be considered a party, but there is nevertheless something festive about gathering with others to hear their arguments and... Read more

I recently described how I read the Gospel of Matthew looking for an understanding of salvation: by keeping Paul in the back of my mind, but not letting him get in the front of my mind. I wasn’t claiming to be original, just describing and recommending the kind of Bible reading that I think is theologically and exegetically responsible. But consider just how deeply unoriginal I was being: Reading Matthew with Pauline theology in mind goes way back to at... Read more

Next Thursday and Friday, Biola University will host the first annual  Los Angeles Theology Conference. There’s some bookish goodness going on at this event: All of the plenary lectures and a few of the parallel papers from the conference will be published within the year by Zondervan, in a volume bearing the same title as the 2013 conference: Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Theology. Here’s a first peek at the cover. With chapters by Oliver Crisp, George Hunsinger, Peter... Read more

Arius the Libyan: An Idyll of the Early Church (NY: Appleton, 1884) was a work of historical fiction that portrayed Arius as the real hero of the fourth century. To portray Arius as the good guy requires a complete re-imagining of what Christianity is all about, and that’s what Arius the Libyan attempted. Read my summary and analysis of the book’s theology in a previous post. Reception of Arius the Libyan How was the book received? Did people like it?... Read more

 Paul J. Griffith’s 2009 book Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar is a fascinating work. I’ve been reading it a little bit at a time over the past few months. When you’re reading a book that’s all about analyzing the desire to read and know things, you think twice about gobbling down chapter after chapter. So I’m taking it slowly. But I just read a very helpful review of the book in the journal Modern Theology. The reviewer (John Cavadini of Notre Dame)... Read more

The vocabulary of Ephesians is is rich in “house” and “building” words. Most of them show up in a good English translation, but there are several more in the original Greek. At some points, Paul seems almost to be punning on “house” words, or Greek words made from the oik-  root. For example, a key passage in 2:19 says “so then you are no longer strangers and aliens [par-oik-ioi], but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of... Read more