Theologia et Vita

What Hath Silicon Valley to Do with Jerusalem? Introducing Image and Artifact: A Statement on Artificial Intelligence Whatever the evangelical church has made of artificial intelligence so far, it has not made much theology out of it. Or at least much good theology. Responses have sorted into alarm and enthusiasm. The doctrines that actually govern the questions have mostly stayed off the table: the image of God, the nature of the soul, the limits of human making, the idolatry that crouches at the door of every technology we fashion and begin to trust. That absence is what prompted Image and Artifact . The structure follows the three confessional documents produced by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy between 1978 and 1986: the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application. Each uses the same architecture: a preface, a condensed summary, definitional groundwork, and a series of ...

When Christians talk about the gospel, opinions often multiply quickly. Is it the kingdom? Salvation? Justification? Discipleship? All of those themes matter, of course, but when we ask where the New Testament itself comes closest to defining the gospel, one passage towers above the rest: 1 Corinthians 15:1–5. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight puts it bluntly: “The best place to begin is the one place in the entire New Testament where someone actually comes close to defining the word gospel. First Corinthians 15 is that place.” Paul is reminding the Corinthians of the very message that brought them to faith, the message in which they now stand, and the message by which they are being saved. There is a fascinating detail in the Greek text that gets lost in translation. Paul writes to euangelion ho euangelisamēn humin —literally, “the gospel that I gospeled to you.” English versions smooth this out as “the gospel I preached to you,” but Paul intentionally piles up gospel language. His ...

A poem (using a cascading litany form), based on my recent post, “The Carrying”: He carries. Not merely sustains, as though the universe were a clock and He its distant keeper. Not merely upholds, as though existence balanced itself upon borrowed momentum. He carries. The atom and the archangel, the whale-road and the wandering star, the dust mote adrift in a shaft of morning light, the fire of a thousand suns. Every electron circling its hidden center. Every photon crossing impossible distances. Every breath drawn by every creature from Eden until now. He carries. The dice tumble across the table, striking wood, bouncing, turning, their final resting place already beneath His hand. The clouds gather over thirsty fields. Rain falls upon furrow and forest. The earth drinks because He visits it. What we call weather, Scripture calls God. He carries. Two sparrows flutter in a market cage, worth scarcely more than a laborer's hour. One falls. Not beyond His notice. Not outside His decr...

 There is a temptation, when you have found a theological home, to let it do all the work. Penal substitution explains the cross, the logic goes, so we are finished. And penal substitution does explain the cross, in ways that are central and indispensable, more thoroughly developed in the New Testament than anything else on offer. But the New Testament itself refuses to stop there. It reaches for law-court language, then temple language, then the slave market, then the battlefield, then the family. Five semantic fields, each distinct enough that no single model can hold all of them at once. That multiplicity is not a sign of theological confusion in the biblical authors. It is a sign that the event they are describing exceeds every individual framework brought to bear on it. This is something I work through in considerable detail in All Things in Christ , my larger works-in-progress systematic theology, and what follows is a compressed summary of the argument. The short version: th...

  The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word… (Heb 1:3a, LSB) The Greek verb in Hebrews 1:3 is pherō . Translators usually render it "upholding” or “sustaining,” but the word means, plainly, "to carry." The Son carries all things by the word of His power. Not props them up. Not winds them like a clock and steps back. Carries. The image is closer to a parent bearing a sleeping child than an engineer monitoring a system. Every electron orbiting every nucleus, every photon striking every retina at this moment, is being personally borne along by the Lord Jesus. Withdraw His carrying for an instant and the universe does not coast. It dissolves. Consider what Scripture insists on. The lot is cast into the lap, and every decision is from the Lord (Prov 16:33). Throw dice, draw straws, decide on a whim. The result was already in His hand. The rain of Psalm 65 falls because He visits the earth and w...

One of the more anachronistic mistakes people make when discussing the early church is imagining that the fathers operated with the same “Bible versus tradition” framework that dominates so many modern debates. They usually did not. In fact, the very men most frequently quoted by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians in defense of tradition were often equally emphatic about the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. The tension is not nearly as neat as internet polemics make it sound. What the fathers faced was not a world where heretics denied Scripture altogether. Quite the opposite. Nearly every major heretical movement arrived carrying a Bible under its arm. Arius quoted Proverbs and John. Sabellius appealed to Scripture. The Donatists did the same. So did Pelagius. Even the Gnostics, bizarre as some of their cosmologies became, often wrapped themselves in biblical language. That created a real interpretive crisis. If everyone claims the Bible, how do you distinguish ap...