Theologia et Vita

The Illusion of the Untarnished Church J. Neil Daniels There is a strange nostalgia in contemporary Christianity, a wistfulness for what some call “organic Christianity,” as though the moment the ink dried on the last page of the New Testament, the church entered a golden age of doctrinal purity and unbroken unity. In this romanticized vision, the church of the late first and early second centuries stands as the standard by which all later theology must be judged. The only problem is that the actual historical record refuses to play along. The earliest days of the church were messy. They were beautiful, yes, vibrant with missionary zeal and sacrificial love, but they were also riddled with error, confusion, and outright heresy. The Apostles themselves were constantly correcting false doctrine, and they were doing so inside the New Testament period, not after it. Paul did not write Galatians because everything was going swimmingly in Asia Minor. He wrote it because an entire region o...

Fire Without Flame: A Protestant Reappraisal and Rebuttal of Purgatory’s Modern Revival J. Neil Daniels I. The Strange Return of an Old Fire Not many doctrines have traveled such a curious path as purgatory. Once the bedrock of late medieval Catholic piety — an invisible realm crowded with suffering souls, masses, indulgences, and anxious relatives — it became, almost overnight, one of the great heresies of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s first hammer blows against the Castle Church door at Wittenberg in 1517 were aimed precisely at this system: the economy of indulgences feeding off the idea of temporal punishment after death.¹ For centuries since, Protestants have treated purgatory as something more than just an error. It was a theological emblem of everything wrong with medieval religion — superstition, sacerdotal control, the captivity of consciences. Yet in a turn that would have bewildered the Reformers, the idea has flickered again within certain...

Beyond Exaltation and Neglect: Recovering the Biblical Mary J. Neil Daniels Introduction Among the figures who inhabit the pages of Scripture, few have inspired as much devotion, speculation, and controversy as Mary, the mother of Jesus. From the earliest centuries of the church, her name— Miryam in Hebrew, Maria or Mariam in Greek—has evoked reverence and reflection. Yet the New Testament’s portrait of her is remarkably restrained. Mary’s story unfolds quietly, almost unassumingly, within the larger drama of redemption. She is present at decisive moments—the annunciation, the birth, the first miracle, the cross, and the birth of the church—yet never as the focus of attention. Her greatness lies not in exalted titles or metaphysical prerogatives but in faith: a willing, intelligent, and courageous submission to the Word of God. This essay seeks to construct a biblically faithful portrait of Mary by examining the principal texts in which she appears and considering their theologi...

Enough Light to Believe, Enough Shadow to Doubt J. Neil Daniels It’s curious, isn’t it, how God never quite overwhelms us with proof? The universe could’ve been built like a neon sign flashing “MADE BY YAHWEH,” yet He chose a subtler route—a world that whispers rather than shouts. The heavens declare the glory of God, yes, but they do so in poetry, not in a laboratory manual. The stars burn with precision, the DNA coil hums with mathematical beauty, and moral law tugs at our conscience like a thread we can’t quite pull free. There’s too much coherence, too much meaning for it all to be random—and yet, He leaves just enough ambiguity that unbelief remains possible. I sometimes think God’s restraint is a kind of mercy. If He were to split the sky every morning or write His name in the clouds daily at noon, faith would die the moment it appeared. We’d become coerced spectators, not lovers of truth. The God of Scripture seems uninterested in forced allegiance. He wants trust, not terror. J...

Reading with Eyes of Faith J. Neil Daniels When you read the Gospels— really read them, not just skim the familiar stories like a well-worn photograph—you begin to realize how unnervingly alive Jesus still is on those pages. He isn’t a distant figure locked in first-century Palestine. He moves through the text with startling immediacy: a man who could calm storms with a word, but also pause to notice a bleeding woman reaching for the fringe of His robe. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each show you a facet of Him, like four camera angles capturing the same radiant subject. But unless you approach those pages with what the old Puritans used to call “the eye of faith,” you’ll only see the surface—ink, paper, and pious words. It’s like trying to appreciate Handel’s Messiah by reading the sheet music in silence. Active reading, when it comes to Scripture, is a deeply spiritual act. It means refusing to sit as a passive observer, nodding politely while the text does its work elsewhere. It’s...

Weighing the Past: Historical Method, Hermeneutics, and the Quest for Jesus J. Neil Daniels Nota Bene : A "Deep Dive" audio overview is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N2MDk5gGa74m3DO5gFNg4a2hPJRH8zp-/view?usp=drivesdk Introduction: The Historian as Judge and Juror Historical inquiry is often likened to a courtroom. Evidence is presented, arguments are made, and verdicts are rendered—though with one crucial difference. Unlike jurors, historians are not bound to their first conclusions. They may and often must revisit them as new evidence emerges or old evidence is reconsidered. Robert B. Stewart opens his essay Judging What They Say about Jesus with this analogy, drawn from his own upbringing as a “judge’s kid.” His father’s relentless demand for coherence and plausibility in every explanation becomes a metaphor for the historian’s vocation: sifting competing accounts of the past, testing them against evidence, and rendering judgments that are humble, prov...

Does God Change His Mind? Divine Constancy and Contingency in the Old Testament J. Neil Daniels Introduction: The Puzzle of a Repenting God The Bible does something rather unsettling. On one page it insists that God “is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent” (Num 23:19). Flip a few pages, and you find Him doing precisely that: “The Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people” (Exod 32:14). One verse portrays God’s purposes as unshakeable, another depicts Him as responsive, even reactive, to human behavior. Classical theologians from Augustine to Aquinas have leaned hard on the first set of texts to safeguard divine immutability. Yet the second set won’t go away. They stubbornly remain, unsettling neat systematic categories and demanding a more careful reading of Scripture itself. Robert B. Chisholm Jr.’s 1995 study “Does God ‘Change His Mind’?” remains one of the most incisive treatments of this tension, and it will s...

I’ve been spending the past several weeks deep in what feels like a grand conversation across two thousand years—listening, comparing, and trying to catch the tone of how the Church has spoken about Christ. The project began simply enough: to identify the most significant contributions to Christology through the centuries and write short, paragraph-length summaries of each. But somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like data collection and turned into a kind of pilgrimage. Each figure—ancient, medieval, modern—has their own cadence, their own astonished vocabulary for the same wonder: that the Word became flesh. One day it’s Gregory of Nazianzus, his sentences like lightning over Cappadocia, stammering to describe the “Godhead veiled in flesh.” The next, it’s Thomas à Kempis, quiet and practical, reminding you that imitation is itself a kind of knowing. Then suddenly you’re in the 13th century, with Bonaventure and Duns Scotus arguing (beautifully) about whether the Incarnation wo...