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Contend Without Becoming Contentious: The Proper Place of Christian Polemics

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The results of my recent Substack poll were about as nuanced as I expected. Of 72 respondents, 25 percent said Christian polemics are very helpful , 43 percent somewhat helpful , 22 percent minimally helpful , and only 9 percent not helpful at all . Allowing for rounding, roughly two-thirds of respondents see real value in theological debate between professing Christians, but the largest group chose the qualified answer: somewhat . I suspect that qualification is doing a great deal of work. Most of us have seen polemics clarify an issue beautifully. We have also watched them turn into ecclesiastical cage fighting with Bible verses and little if any Christlikeness. Strictly speaking, polemics is more precise than simply “Christians arguing about theology.” The New Dictionary of Theology defines it as a branch of dogmatic theology concerned with defending the doctrinal claims of one Christian confession or tradition against competing claims; it is therefore primarily inter- and intra-c...
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God Is Not an Egg: The Use—and Abuse—of Trinitarian Analogies

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Sooner or later, nearly every Christian trying to explain the Trinity reaches for something in the created world. A shamrock. An egg. Water as liquid, ice, and vapor. A man who is simultaneously a father, husband, and son. The instinct behind this is understandable, and not entirely wrong. Theology itself depends upon analogical language because we are finite creatures speaking about the infinite Creator. God really has revealed Himself, so our words about Him are not empty; yet He is not simply a larger specimen of the kinds of things we already know. As D. Glenn Butner puts it, drawing upon the classical doctrine of analogy, there is genuine likeness between Creator and creature, but always a still greater unlikeness.¹ That little qualification matters enormously. An analogy can illuminate one feature of Trinitarian doctrine. Trouble begins when we expect it to reproduce the Trinity in miniature. Christians have been doing this far longer than Sunday-school teachers have been cutting...
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The Gospel Under Strange Skies: Aliens, Angels, and Christian Discernment

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“Is there extraterrestrial life?” is actually four questions wearing one trench coat. Microbial life beyond Earth would raise interesting questions for creation but almost none for the gospel. Complex animal life would add considerably to our knowledge of God's creative abundance without requiring a new doctrine of salvation. Rational, morally accountable extraterrestrial persons would be another matter, since they would force questions about the imago Dei , sin, revelation, and redemption. And alleged UFO or UAP encounters belong to a fourth category altogether: they are historical and evidential claims about purported visitors, not necessary consequences of astronomy or astrobiology. C. S. Lewis saw the need for distinctions like these as early as 1958. Before asking what extraterrestrials would mean for Christianity, he insisted that we ask what sort of creatures they are, whether they are rational, whether they are fallen, and whether they stand in need of redemption.¹ That is ...
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Words Worth Fighting For: The Strange Vocabulary of the Trinity

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  One of the mildly ironic things about Trinitarian theology is that some of its most important words are not found in the Bible. Trinity is one of them. Homoousios , hypostasis , perichoresis , circumincession —none appears in the biblical text as a technical Trinitarian term. That fact has occasionally been turned into an objection by anti-trinitarians, but really it misses why the vocabulary developed in the first place. The church was trying to say, with excruciating precision, what the whole Bible required Christians to believe when individual biblical statements could be bent in several directions. Theophilus of Antioch was already using the Greek trias in the second century, apparently without feeling much need to explain it; by the early third century Tertullian could speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as three personae yet one substantia . The vocabulary became sharper because the controversies became sharper. Arius could quote Scripture. So could the modalists. So could ...
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When the Cathedral Changes While You’re Building It

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  Étienne Gilson famously described the great medieval summae as “cathedrals of the mind,” and I have returned to that image more times than I can count and probably more times than you can stand. It captures something about systematic theology that words like organization or doctrinal synthesis simply do not. A system has foundations, load-bearing walls, arches, sightlines, chambers within chambers. One doctrine leans upon another. Christology bears weight in soteriology; anthropology affects hamartiology; one’s doctrine of Scripture quietly governs almost everything else. Since my conversion, I have been drawn almost instinctively to that kind of theological construction. I eventually earned a terminal degree in systematic theology, have spent roughly three decades immersed in the discipline, and recently published The Craft of Systematic Theology: An Exegetical and Sequential Blueprint for Building a Doctrinal System . And, with miles to go before I sleep, I am still building...
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Within One Another: The Strange Beauty of Trinitarian Perichoresis

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  Perichoresis (Greek perichōrēsis ) is the old theological term for the mutual indwelling, coinherence, or interpenetration of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three divine persons do not exist alongside one another as three centers of deity, each occupying His own little metaphysical patch of ground. The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, and the Spirit eternally shares the same indivisible divine life. Each person is fully the one God, while remaining irreducibly Father, Son, or Spirit. One small clarification is worth highlighting because it gets repeated constantly: perichoresis does not literally mean “the divine dance.” As D. Glenn Butner points out, perichōrein derives from chōrein , “to go,” “make room for,” or “contain,” not choreuein , to dance in a chorus. The dance can function as a modern metaphor, perhaps, but it is not the etymology (Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics , 133–35; cf. Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology , 1:892). The idea i...
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Before You Throw the Punch…

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Today I noticed someone trying to antagonize me by attacking what they apparently—and erroneously—think is a position I hold. This time, I didn’t take the bait. That’s beside the point, though, because the episode reminded me of an essay by Roger R. Nicole that I happened to revisit recently: “Polemic Theology: How to Deal with Those Who Differ from Us.” The timing could hardly be better. Nicole’s essay first appeared a quarter-century ago, can be found in Standing Forth: Collected Writings of Roger Nicole and was reprinted in the Winter 2005 issue of The Emmaus Journal , with a supplement written specifically for that publication. Nicole (1915—2010) was hardly a lightweight. Born in Germany to French Swiss parents, he studied at Lausanne, the Sorbonne, Gordon Divinity School, and Harvard; he was a charter member of the Evangelical Theological Society in 1949, taught at Gordon-Conwell for forty-one years and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando for another eleven, and served as a ...
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