Theologia et Vita

  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...

  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...

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 ...

THE BORROWED VOICE Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of the Christian Pen J. Neil Daniels Abstract This essay offers a balanced theological assessment of artificial intelligence for a Christian readership already living with the technology rather than merely anticipating it. It traces the definitions and uneven history of AI from Alan Turing's 1950 test through the 2022 arrival of generative models, surveys genuine goods the technology has produced—theological retrieval and translation chief among them—alongside genuine abuses: forged testimony, algorithmic pornography, engineered companionship, and the temptation of the state to use AI's dangers as a pretext for expanding its own reach over speech. Both assessments are grounded in a doctrine of man drawn from Genesis 1–2: the image of God, the breath of life, and the difference between the imitation of thought and its possession. The essay's constructive burden is narrower and more urgent: to distinguish, on b...

Beloved Enemies Israel’s Irrevocable Calling between Dispensationalism and Progressive Covenantalism J. Neil Daniels Abstract Romans 11:28 predicates enmity and belovedness of the same people at the same moment, and the correlative μέν … δέ makes that simultaneity a grammatical datum rather than a theological inference. This essay builds the case for a future for national Israel on that verse and on its ground in 11:29, then locates the resulting position between revised dispensationalism and progressive covenantalism. It concedes that ὁ Ἰσραὴλ τοῦ θεοῦ in Galatians 6:16 most probably denotes the church, argues that the concession costs the position nothing, and declines the dispensational sine qua non that treats the Israel-church distinction as a premise rather than a consequence. The christological grounding is developed from the union of Davidic and divine sonship in the incarnate Son: promise escalates in Christ without evaporating. Objections drawn from Romans 9:6, from...