Theologia et Vita

Thoughts on the Epistemology of Disagreement J. Neil Daniels When it comes to theology, disagreement isn’t just a nuisance, it’s practically unavoidable. Even within a single denomination, you’ll find sharp divergences over what counts as orthodox, what Scripture truly teaches, and how tradition ought to weigh against personal interpretation. But here’s the tricky part: some disagreements aren’t trivial squabbles; they come from people who really know their stuff, people you might even call your epistemic peers. That matters, because when someone equally equipped challenges your view, it forces you to ask, almost against your natural inclination, “Do I actually know what I think I know?” Encountering a peer’s disagreement in theology is like looking at your reflection in a slightly warped mirror. You see yourself, but a bit askew. Some scholars call this “higher-order evidence”—the notion that the disagreement itself is evidence about your own epistemic reliability. Imagine you’ve spen...

The Impossible Purity: Wrestling with the Sinlessness of Christ J. Neil Daniels The Scriptural Witness The New Testament never wavers on the matter. Jesus is depicted as a man who walked, ate, wept, sweated, and died—yet also as one without sin. Hebrews insists he was “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). Peter, borrowing language from Isaiah’s Servant Song, writes with a kind of plainness that resists embellishment: “He committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth” (1 Pet 2:22). John sharpens the point even further: “In him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). And Paul, always the theologian of paradox, connects Christ’s sinlessness directly to the cross: “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor 5:21). The earliest Christian confession did not hesitate to hold together two things that appear—on first glance—nearly incompatible: that Jesus was fully human, like us, and that Jes...

The Early Church’s Affirmation of Penal Substitutionary Atonement: A Dialectical Reassessment J. Neil Daniels Introduction Modern theology often treats penal substitutionary atonement as a doctrinal latecomer. Gustaf Aulén’s classic study Christus Victor cast the early church as preoccupied with cosmic victory rather than legal satisfaction.¹ Paul Fiddes went further, claiming that penal substitution was “developed in the Reformation period,”² while others have argued that substitutionary motifs betray a peculiarly Western legal cast alien to the Fathers.³ And in the popular realm, critics such as Steve Chalke have caricatured the view as “cosmic child abuse.”⁴ The force of such claims is not trivial. If penal substitution is absent from the first millennium of Christian theology, then its defenders must shoulder the burden of proof. Nor is the question simply academic: if the Reformers truly invented the doctrine, then its claim to catholicity is fatally compromised. And yet, wh...

Thoughts on the Perils and Promises of Proof-Texting J. Neil Daniels  If you spend any time around theologians or seminary students, you’ll hear someone scoff at “proof-texting.” The phrase has become shorthand for a slapdash approach to theology: plucking verses from here and there, wrenching them from their contexts, and forcing them into the service of tidy doctrinal systems. Ralph Martin once complained that such “dogmatic approaches” turn the New Testament into an “arsenal” of isolated texts, atomizing meaning and ignoring historical, literary, and theological context. Kevin Vanhoozer warns that this approach can flatten Scripture’s rich diversity of genres and confuse biblical language with doctrinal formulation. And D. A. Carson worries that proof-texting risks distorting Scripture by imposing on it categories foreign to its own historical and literary world. In short, the prosecution’s case is strong: proof-texting can encourage cherry-picking, subjectivism, and even anachr...

Fractured Windows: Reassessing the Early Church’s Resistance to Icons J. Neil Daniels A Shaky Claim to Continuity The appeal of Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly for evangelicals adrift in a sea of denominational flux, lies in its claim of pristine continuity. Orthodoxy presents itself as the faith of the apostles unchanged, the church eternal, the original pattern preserved without distortion. Converts in America—whether Hank Hanegraaff in 2017 or Peter Gillquist’s entire network of house churches back in 1987—often testify that they have “found the early church.” The promise is intoxicating: no more squabbles over sola fide or episcopal polity; no more doctrinal innovations; just the unbroken stream of faith flowing back to Jerusalem itself. Yet this claim of continuity falters when confronted with the stubborn evidence of history. And nowhere does the tension show more clearly than in the matter of icons. The Orthodox insist that the early church venerated sacred images, that what ...

The Architecture of a Christian Mind J. Neil Daniels  Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 4:8 is one of those deceptively simple sentences that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a whole way of life: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable—if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” That last phrase— dwell on these things —is the hinge. Paul is not offering a list of fleeting thoughts to entertain for a moment but a blueprint for mental habitation. The Greek verb logizesthe implies deliberate, ongoing reflection, the kind of slow, careful thinking that shapes character. It’s a call to curate the interior world, to guard the door of the mind and choose what lives there. That’s far harder than it sounds in an age where our thoughts are constantly hijacked by headlines, scrolling feeds, and anxieties that buzz like background static. The l...

Knowing Jesus through Illeism J. Neil Daniels Illeism is one of those strange little features of Scripture that we tend to skim past without much thought, but it’s worth pausing over. The term just means speaking about oneself in the third person, as if you were talking about someone else entirely. Jesus does this a lot, most famously with his repeated references to Himself as the “Son of Man.” For modern ears, it can sound a bit stilted—almost like a character in a novel talking about themselves from the outside. But in the biblical world, this way of speaking carried deep resonance. It wasn’t just a rhetorical quirk; it carried weight and authority, linking the speaker to traditions far older than the Gospels themselves. You can see this most clearly in John’s Gospel. Jesus not only calls Himself the Son of Man but also refers to the roles of “Father” and “Son” in ways that sound detached, almost formal. Perhaps the most striking example comes in John 17:3, when Jesus prays, “Now th...

Living to God: Systematic Theology as Eupraxic and Doxological J. Neil Daniels "Saint Augustine," by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) I ntroduction: A Discipline with a Pulse Systematic theology has too often been accused of living in the rarefied air of lecture halls, its feet dangling above the ground of real Christian life. The caricature is familiar: theologians scribbling away on doctrines with no concern for how the truths they polish might actually take root in the lives of ordinary believers. But this caricature only persists because it is partly true—one has only to scan the table of contents of many twentieth-century systematic theologies to notice how little attention is paid to ethics, spirituality, or worship. Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley note the striking contrast between earlier Reformed systems (Calvin, Ames, Turretin, à Brakel, John Brown of Haddington) and more modern ones, many of which omit any significant discussion of the Christian life as lived before...

Why Would a Loving God Create Hell? Wrestling with the Problem of Evil and Eternal Punishment J. Neil Daniels Nota Bene : The following is a summary of chapter 6 of my current work in progress, The Darkness Outside: A Cumulative-Case Apologetic for the Doctrine of Eternal Conscious Punishment, being a reworking of my graduate dissertation. Introduction  Every serious conversation about God eventually runs headlong into the problem of evil. It’s not just an academic puzzle—though philosophers have spilled barrels of ink over it—it’s the cry of the heart when tragedy hits, when injustice festers, when death snatches someone we love. If God is good, if He’s powerful, why all this? And more pointedly, why hell? It’s one thing to try and make sense of wars and earthquakes and disease; it’s another to stare at Jesus’ words about outer darkness, where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, and admit that He wasn’t being metaphorical or exaggerating for effect. The idea of eternal punishm...