Theologia et Vita

  William Lane Craig is sometimes accused rather loosely of Apollinarianism, but in this case the label is not something his critics simply dreamed up. Craig and J. P. Moreland themselves propose what they call a “reformulation (or rehabilitation!) of Apollinarius’s insight.” Their goal is understandable: preserve the unity of Christ’s person without turning Jesus into two subjects, two selves, or two persons awkwardly sharing the same skin. The difficulty is that their solution places the divine Logos where orthodox Christology insists a genuinely created human rational soul, mind, and will must be. D. Glenn Butner devotes a remarkably useful discussion to the problem in Christological Dogmatics , and Donnie L. DeBord has pursued it even more extensively. DeBord’s interest is hardly casual: he earned his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2022 with a dissertation titled A Chalcedonian Critique of Neo-Apollinarianism , completed under the g...

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...

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...

“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 ...

  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 ...