Reflections on the loving kindness of the Triune God
Jonathan Edwards, 18th century pastor and scholar, made two points about Romans 8:6—“To be spiritually minded is life and peace”—in his “Treatise on Grace” (Works, Yale ed., 21.178): “(1) That this divine principle in the heart is not called spiritual, because it has its seat in the soul or spiritual part of man, and not …
Read More Spiritually MindedMike and I celebrated over breakfast a week ago and I handed him his segment of small chain, four links long. I like to do that whenever I finish a one-on-one Bible read-through with a friend. The links represent elements of what Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 2:2—“and what you have heard from me in …
Read More Chain LinksThis entry is taken from a post first offered on the Cor Deo website. Please offer any response on that site: thanks! I noticed something in Job I hadn’t seen before. Job’s erstwhile friends all used an “if . . . then” approach to confront Job over his presumed sins. The point was simple: If …
Read More “If . . . then”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 Spirit