Theologia et Vita

  Read Revelation 21:1–22:5 slowly and you will find the Father on the throne and the Lamb, a bride, a city with Israel's twelve tribes written on its gates, a tree whose leaves heal the nations. Look for the Holy Spirit and, at first, you will not find Him named. E. K. Galle raised the issue; David Mathewson asks the question outright: where is the Spirit in the new creation, and should readers even expect to find Him there?¹ Daniel Castelo notes that some have called the Spirit "the shy member of the Trinity," and the last two chapters of the Bible can seem to prove the point.² The Old Testament shows Him hovering over the deep, filling Bezalel, rushing upon Samson, breathing life into Ezekiel's valley of bones. The New Testament gives us Pentecost and a Pauline pneumatology so pervasive the apostle can scarcely speak of Christian existence without speaking of the Spirit. Then the canon reaches the eternal state and the explicit references thin almost to nothing. A ...

  I keep hearing that biblical inerrancy is a modern invention, a rationalistic box imposed on Scripture by nervous fundamentalists who needed the Bible to behave like a science textbook. Historically, that simply will not do. Yes, inerrancy as a technical term was sharpened in later controversy, the way Trinity , homoousios , and hypostatic union are all postbiblical terms too. But the question was never whether Christians in A.D. 180 used our vocabulary. The real question is whether they believed the thing the vocabulary names. Jude urges believers to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints" (Jude 3), and Lee Allen Anderson traces that "faith" to an objective body of revealed truth whose authoritative source is the God-breathed Scriptures themselves.[1] If the God who gave them cannot lie, his Word cannot finally be a mixture of divine truth and human falsehood. The biblical case is short and direct. "All Scripture ...

  Finis Jennings Dake had a proof text for every body part he gave God.¹ Richard Howe uses him to make a point most of us grant in the abstract and dodge in practice. Once the verses are all on the table, the argument that remains is about which of them to read literally. Howe's test case is Genesis 3:8. Ask a friend whether God has legs, given that he walks in the garden, and the friend says no and cites John 4:24, that God is spirit. Ask why John 4 gets to be the literal text and Genesis 3 the figure, and the friend has run out of Scripture and started doing philosophy. Every systematic theologian makes that move daily, usually without announcing it. The open question is whether the theory of predication doing the work has ever been examined. Paul warns the Colossians against being taken captive through philosophy and empty deception (Col. 2:8, LSB), and Christians have read that as a ban for most of two thousand years. Howe follows Alford and Peake on the grammar. The missing ar...

  We tend to reserve the word sin for things loud enough to scandalize us. Murder. Adultery. Theft. Drunkenness. Apostasy. But there is another class of sins that can sit quite comfortably in a church pew: impatience, envy, resentment, ingratitude, self-pity, gossip, loveless criticism, subtle pride, discontent, and the anxious insistence on controlling what God has not put in our hands. These are sometimes called “respectable sins,” not because Scripture regards them lightly, but because we do. Their earthly consequences are not all equal, certainly, but they share the same ugly anatomy: a heart failing to love God and neighbor as it ought. Beeke and Smalley put their finger on the problem: “We are often more concerned about sin’s consequences for ourselves than its offense to God.”¹ Cornelius Plantinga approaches the same reality from another angle. Sin, he argues, is “culpable shalom-breaking,” the guilty vandalizing of the order, flourishing, communion, and peace God loves.² ...

  Deuteronomy 1:39 doesn't mention an age. Neither does Isaiah 7:15–16, or Jonah 4:11, or Matthew 19:14, the four texts almost every defender of the doctrine reaches for first, and not one of them fixes a birthday. "Age of accountability" is a phrase Scripture never uses, naming a category the church spent most of its history doing without. What it names is the point at which a child, previously incapable of the moral understanding sin requires, becomes capable of it, and so becomes responsible before God for personal transgression rather than merely inheriting Adam's. Below that point, however it is located, a child who dies is held by most of the tradition to die safe. Above it, the ordinary terms of the gospel apply: faith and repentance, offered to someone now able to refuse them. That definition sounds tidy until you ask what grounds it, and there the tradition splinters into at least four incompatible answers. Rome locates the child's safety in baptism and t...

  The phrase "Apostolic Fathers" is younger than the King James Bible. William Varner notes that it was never used in church history until J. B. Cotelier published a collection under that name in 1672, and that William Wake's English translation followed in 1693.¹ That small fact is useful to keep in mind, because "the fathers" is a category the church built after the fact. It means the pastors, bishops, apologists and theologians of roughly the first seven or eight centuries, ending with Gregory the Great (d. 604) in the Latin West and John of Damascus (d. c. 749) in the Greek East. The older textbooks gave four marks: antiquity, orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life, and the church's approval. That last mark is why Origen and Tertullian sit awkwardly on the list. The corpus is enormous. Migne's Patrologia Graeca runs to 161 volumes and the Patrologia Latina to 221. Most English readers meet the fathers in the 38 volumes of the Ante-Nicene and Nice...