Theologia et Vita

The year the Orthodox Creed appeared in print, 1679, England was still bruised from the Clarendon Code and the Five Mile Act, both of which had made life for Dissenters legally precarious for nearly two decades. Baptists in particular found themselves in a very precarious situation, caught between a restored monarchy hostile to nonconformity and a culture of religious suspicion that made any confession of faith simultaneously a theological document and a political act. Thomas Monck wrote the Orthodox Creed for the English General Baptists residing in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Oxfordshire, congregations that held an Arminian soteriology and had been organizing regionally since at least the Standard Confession of 1660. The creed was drafted following a Baptist regional assembly held in Buckinghamshire in 1678, and intended to function as an official statement for the General Assembly of General Baptists in England. The confession is organized around fifty articles...

Leonardo's Last Supper is set at high noon, daylight flooding through the windows, the disciples all seated on one side of a banquet table laden with fish and leavened bread. Mark and Luke are clear: this was a Passover, eaten at night, with participants reclining. There is no lamb, no unleavened bread, and the choreography is entirely wrong. But the painting has so colonized the collective imagination that most people, asked to picture the Last Supper, see Leonardo's staging and nothing else. This is the pattern across a majority of the most celebrated works in Western Christian art: the evangelists get revised, quietly and brilliantly, into something the painter's own century could absorb. Giotto's Nativity (1305, Scrovegni Chapel) gives us a rustic stable, an ox and ass, Mary reclining in exhaustion. Matthew mentions magi; Luke mentions a manger and shepherds. The stable is nowhere. The animals come from Isaiah 1:3 by way of medieval imagination. Giotto's visua...

The doctrine of divine simplicity is one of those positions that sounds counterintuitive the first time you encounter it, and then, once it clicks, you start wondering how anyone could seriously think otherwise. The claim, stated in its classical form, is that God has no parts. No division between His existence and His essence, no real distinction between His attributes, no gap between what He is and that He is. His wisdom is not a property He happens to possess; it just is God, considered under a certain mode of description. Same with His love, His power, His holiness. You are not adding things together when you speak of God. The Augustinian instinct behind this was solid: if God were composed of parts, those parts would in some sense be prior to God, and then you've got an explanatory regress and, worse, a god who owes his existence to something other than himself. Aquinas systematized the intuition in the Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 3 with his trademark precision, but the roots go ...

  The Ordering Intelligence: What Heidegger Would Say About the Machine That Thinks Sparked by my weekly phone call with my father The temptation, whenever a genuinely new technology arrives, is to reach for the nearest available category and stuff the thing inside it. Artificial intelligence gets called a tool, a mirror, a threat, an assistant, a calculator with pretensions. None of these quite fit, and the misfit is not accidental. It points to something Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) diagnosed about technology in general: that the essence of a technological development is never captured by describing its mechanism. What matters is what it does to the world that receives it, to the minds that come to depend on it, to the kind of perceiving and valuing that it trains into human beings over time. That is where the interesting and uncomfortable questions live. Heidegger's 1954 essay "Die Frage nach der Technik" (which my father first translated into English, before William L...

“These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” (Psalm 50:21) That verse may be one of the most penetrating diagnoses of the human condition in all of Scripture. The problem in David's day was not merely open wickedness. It was something deeper. People assumed that because God had not acted immediately in judgment, He must approve of their conduct. They mistook divine patience for divine indifference. Worse still, they imagined God to be just like them. In a sense, this is the story of humanity from Eden onward. The serpent's temptation rested on the idea that God was not who He revealed Himself to be. Since then, fallen men have continually reshaped God into their own image. We prefer a deity who shares our priorities, excuses our sins, applauds our preferences, and never confronts us. The golden calf was not merely an idol; it was an attempt to make God manageable. That same im...

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 ...