Reflections on the loving kindness of the Triune God
God is humble. It’s a truth too important to miss—yet many of us do. It’s important because our perception of God shapes how we relate to him. If we see him as proud our natural response is to be defensive—to view him as we view proud humans. Words like distaste and avoidance then come to …
Read More God’s HumilityYesterday I flew from India to London by way of Istanbul. Throughout the trip I was both reading and gazing out the window. The book on my lap, a biography of Alexander the Great, paralleled my trip. Centuries ago—starting in 334 BCE—Alexander marched his Macedonian and Greek forces all the way to India, defeating every …
Read More Aristotle & AlexanderThis post is taken from the current Cor Deo website. Please offer any responses there. Thanks! The stir for this entry comes from Martin Luther. What caught my attention is a revisit to Tuomo Mannermaa’s intriguing work, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (Fortress, 2005). Luther, according to Mannermaa, held that a believer’s …
Read More Experiencing GodHere’s a question that rarely surfaces these days but it still needs to be asked: How many professing Christians will Jesus receive as his own on judgment day? And how many will be told, “Depart from me, I never knew you!”? Along with this basic two-sided question let me ask a related but more applied …
Read More An Unspoken DebateI’ve been reading Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Coakley & Stang, eds.). The “re-thinking” in the title caught my attention. Most of us have never had a first thought about Dionysius so the idea of a re-think is odd. Never mind, though, whether we know him or not. It’s very likely that he has helped shape …
Read More A Divine StirPaul wrote of two competing laws in Romans 3 as he scolded some of the Jews in Rome for the moralistic demands they placed on Gentile believers. In his view a “law of works” set up self-focused “boasting” about the role we have in faith: “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By …
Read More Reflections on RomansThis entry repeats my entry at the Cor Deo site. Please post any responses there. Thanks! What role does the Holy Spirit play in our salvation? I ask because most formal conversations about salvation feature the Father and the Son while largely ignoring the Spirit. This Spirit-light tradition features the Father’s saving plan for the …
Read More The Saving SpiritRighteousness—and how to achieve it—is at the heart of Christian faith. But what, according to the Bible, makes us righteous? Another word, justification – “to be made righteous”, refers to the same issue: how do we come into a proper standing with God? In Christianity at least three ways of determining righteousness have been promoted: …
Read More Righteous?The spiritual formation movement—popular among many Christians today—has certain attractions. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuits, inaugurated this theme as he promoted a disciplined spirituality in his Spiritual Exercises. Spiritual Directors applied these exercises to aspirants during quietist retreats. Loyola, a former soldier, meant to spread the Catholic faith—and to suppress the …
Read More Spiritual FormationThis article is our current Cor Deo blog. Please offer any responses there: thanks! The Jesus who shows up in a bold, fast-paced, Bible reading is remarkably demanding and incredibly delightful. He overwhelms us both in what he offers and in what he asks for. The problem is that we’re not ready for it. So …
Read More The problem with Jesus