Postcards from Palookaville

Matthew Barrett , a professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary , recently wrote to us with some questions that he verbally asks of seminarians in his classes. As the author of a recent book, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God , he is rapidly emerging as a leading advocate of historic...

The last few years have seen a significant – and most welcome – revival of interest in the Christian doctrine of God among Reformed and evangelical writers. Scholars working in patristic, medieval, and Reformation periods have enriched our knowledge of the creedal and confessional...

A number of people have emailed with regard to my recent series asking versions of the following questions: But don’t words change their meaning over time? So doesn’t the nature of what we subscribe inevitably change as well? A number of observations are in order. First, words do indeed...

Etienne Gilson once commented that to be a competent philosopher, one also needs to be a competent historian of philosophy. Given some of the he terodox ideas currently being promoted by those who claim to be confessional Protestants , Gilson’s rule would seem to apply to theologians as well...

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said...

In Part Two of this four part series, I offered some thoughts on the nature of doctrinal development. Now I want to turn to the discipline of Biblical Theology. Biblical Theology as a discipline emerges formally with the work of Johann Philipp Gabler in the late eighteenth century. In his justly...

Last week, I offered some preliminary thoughts on the relationship between Biblical and Systematic Theology. This week, I want to consider why it is that theology demands more than just harvesting the immediate results of the exegesis of biblical texts. Proper Christian theology is always...

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Paideia Center Conference in Orlando, focused this year on the catholic, creedal understanding of God. I also sat on a discussion panel with Mike Allen, Scott Swain , Blair Smith and Liam Goligher , discussing the Trinity debate of 2016. Asked how it...

Three recent books are worth reading. The first is Thomas Weinandy’s Jesus Becoming Jesus . Weinandy is a Franciscan theologian who is well-known in orthodox Protestant circles for his superlative exposition and defense of classical theism, specifically immutability and impassibility . In...

I taught ministerial candidates for 25 years at three separate institutions and, during that time, came across one question in relation to doctrine more than any other: “Is it preachable ?” In fact, I suspect it was often not really a question -- more an implicit objection to a doctrine...