Theologia et Vita

A Personal Thank You I just wanted to pause today and say a genuine thank you. Sometime this morning, the little counter at the top of my Blogger dashboard rolled past 10,000 views. I stared at it for a moment, a bit stunned, because when I started tapping out these posts I never imagined they’d reach so many eyes. Ten thousand isn’t exactly earth-shattering in the grand scheme of the internet, but to me it feels immense, like finding a room full of people listening when I thought I was talking to myself. What makes it even more meaningful is not just the number, but the faces and voices behind it. Some of you have shared my work, nudging it into circles I never could have reached on my own. Others have left thoughtful comments, sometimes pushing back, sometimes cheering me on, always reminding me that real dialogue still exists out here. A few of you have written private notes of encouragement that landed in my inbox on days when I was seriously considering quitting. You’ve carried me...

Thoughts on Reformation Month J Neil Daniels Every October, a certain date looms large in the memory of the church: October 31, 1517. It was on that chilly autumn day that a little-known Augustinian monk named Martin Luther strode up to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the wood. The document wasn’t meant to start a movement, not exactly. Luther had intended it as an invitation to academic debate over the sale of indulgences, those paper promises of shortened time in purgatory hawked by men like Johann Tetzel. But sparks have a way of leaping farther than we expect, and this one landed on dry tinder. Within weeks, copies of Luther’s theses were spreading like wildfire across Germany, and within months the tremors could be felt throughout Europe. The world would never quite be the same. That moment is why many Christians call October “Reformation Month.” It’s not merely a nod to one monk with a hammer but to an entire seismic shift in the story of...

Thoughts on the Epistemology of Disagreement J. Neil Daniels When it comes to theology, disagreement isn’t just a nuisance, it’s practically unavoidable. Even within a single denomination, you’ll find sharp divergences over what counts as orthodox, what Scripture truly teaches, and how tradition ought to weigh against personal interpretation. But here’s the tricky part: some disagreements aren’t trivial squabbles; they come from people who really know their stuff, people you might even call your epistemic peers. That matters, because when someone equally equipped challenges your view, it forces you to ask, almost against your natural inclination, “Do I actually know what I think I know?” Encountering a peer’s disagreement in theology is like looking at your reflection in a slightly warped mirror. You see yourself, but a bit askew. Some scholars call this “higher-order evidence”—the notion that the disagreement itself is evidence about your own epistemic reliability. Imagine you’ve spen...

The Impossible Purity: Wrestling with the Sinlessness of Christ J. Neil Daniels The Scriptural Witness The New Testament never wavers on the matter. Jesus is depicted as a man who walked, ate, wept, sweated, and died—yet also as one without sin. Hebrews insists he was “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). Peter, borrowing language from Isaiah’s Servant Song, writes with a kind of plainness that resists embellishment: “He committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth” (1 Pet 2:22). John sharpens the point even further: “In him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). And Paul, always the theologian of paradox, connects Christ’s sinlessness directly to the cross: “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor 5:21). The earliest Christian confession did not hesitate to hold together two things that appear—on first glance—nearly incompatible: that Jesus was fully human, like us, and that Jes...

The Early Church’s Affirmation of Penal Substitutionary Atonement: A Dialectical Reassessment J. Neil Daniels Introduction Modern theology often treats penal substitutionary atonement as a doctrinal latecomer. Gustaf Aulén’s classic study Christus Victor cast the early church as preoccupied with cosmic victory rather than legal satisfaction.¹ Paul Fiddes went further, claiming that penal substitution was “developed in the Reformation period,”² while others have argued that substitutionary motifs betray a peculiarly Western legal cast alien to the Fathers.³ And in the popular realm, critics such as Steve Chalke have caricatured the view as “cosmic child abuse.”⁴ The force of such claims is not trivial. If penal substitution is absent from the first millennium of Christian theology, then its defenders must shoulder the burden of proof. Nor is the question simply academic: if the Reformers truly invented the doctrine, then its claim to catholicity is fatally compromised. And yet, wh...

Thoughts on the Perils and Promises of Proof-Texting J. Neil Daniels  If you spend any time around theologians or seminary students, you’ll hear someone scoff at “proof-texting.” The phrase has become shorthand for a slapdash approach to theology: plucking verses from here and there, wrenching them from their contexts, and forcing them into the service of tidy doctrinal systems. Ralph Martin once complained that such “dogmatic approaches” turn the New Testament into an “arsenal” of isolated texts, atomizing meaning and ignoring historical, literary, and theological context. Kevin Vanhoozer warns that this approach can flatten Scripture’s rich diversity of genres and confuse biblical language with doctrinal formulation. And D. A. Carson worries that proof-texting risks distorting Scripture by imposing on it categories foreign to its own historical and literary world. In short, the prosecution’s case is strong: proof-texting can encourage cherry-picking, subjectivism, and even anachr...