Theologia et Vita

The God Who Doesn’t Lose Books There’s a strange irony in the conspiracy theories about the biblical canon, whether it’s the idea that bishops in smoky back rooms “suppressed” certain books, or that Constantine personally curated the New Testament like a man picking chocolates from a sampler. These stories sound bold and edgy, but they actually give human beings a level of power Scripture never grants them. It turns frail, quarrelsome, frequently confused people into near-omnipotent gatekeepers, capable of thwarting the purposes of the God who spoke galaxies into existence. As if Athanasius or Jerome could outmaneuver the Almighty with a clever edit. What gets lost in the drama is the simple truth that God is not passive in His own self-revelation. If He breathed out His Word—really breathed it out, not in some poetic or metaphorical sense—then He also superintended its preservation. The same God who raises kingdoms and topples empires is not suddenly helpless when a council gathers ...

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Scroll J. Neil Daniels  It’s striking how the old vices—those medieval stalwarts—have found fresh life on our glowing rectangles. Pride is the easiest to spot. A decade ago, you couldn’t curate your own public image with this sort of precision; now we polish selfies, trim stories, and frame our lives with the emotional range of a Hallmark commercial. It’s a strange alchemy: take an ordinary Tuesday, filter it with Valencia, add a vague inspirational quote, and suddenly you’re the sage of your tiny digital parish. The early monks warned about vainglory, that impulse to be seen doing good. They never met Instagram, but they knew exactly what they were talking about. Envy pulses just beneath the screen, like a low-grade fever. One glance at someone else’s beach trip, book haul, deadlift PR, or “quiet time aesthetics” and you feel the pinch. It used to be that you envied your neighbors or co-workers—people in your physical orbit. Now you can envy strangers ...

When Inspiration Arrived, Canon Followed The thing critics keep missing is that canon isn’t the result of a dusty committee meeting or a smoke-filled back room where bishops shuffled scrolls like contraband. Canon is simply what happens when God speaks. Inspiration creates its own gravitational field. As soon as a prophetic or apostolic word was given, it carried an authority that differentiated it from everything else in circulation, just as a forged coin feels wrong in the hand compared to the weight of the real thing. That is why Paul’s letters were being copied, traded, and read across Asia Minor within a decade of being written. Nobody was waiting for a council. They already knew what they were dealing with. You can trace this instinct right into the first century. Peter refers to Paul’s letters as “Scripture” while Paul is still alive; that’s not a later power-grab, that’s recognition. The churches treasured these writings the way Israel treasured the oracles of Moses. Look at so...

B efore Bethlehem: The Personally Preexistent Son J. Neil Daniels  The New Testament does not tiptoe around the question of whether the Son personally existed before the manger; it treats that reality as the deep grammar of the gospel. John’s prologue opens not with a birth narrative but with an ontological claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The preposition pros ton Theon (“with God”) signals not mere attribute or abstract divine reason but a relational orientation—face-to-face communion. Then John’s tempo quickens with verbs of agency: “All things came into being through him” (1:3). Creation is not merely coordinated “by” God with a conceptual Logos in the background; it is effected through a distinct hypostatic agent. When that same Logos “became flesh” (1:14), the grammar demands a subject already in existence who then assumes human nature. Incarnation is not the starting gun of the Son’s existence; it is the as...

  Show Me the Text: How the Fathers Put Scripture in the Driver’s Seat J. Neil Daniels  1. Catechumens, Prophets, and the Canon in Jerusalem If you picture Cyril of Jerusalem teaching in the mid-fourth century, it helps to imagine the setting: catechumens gathered in a city still marked by Constantine’s recent building projects, within earshot of the Anastasis, being prepared for baptism in a Church that had only lately emerged from persecution. Cyril stands before them, but he is oddly anxious that they not trust him too much. “Concerning the divine and holy mysteries of the Faith,” he says, “not even a casual statement must be delivered without the Holy Scriptures.”¹ He presses the point so hard that he tells them explicitly not to give him “absolute credence” unless he proves what he says from the “Divine Scriptures,” because the salvation they confess “depends not on ingenious reasoning, but on demonstration of the Holy Scriptures.”² Cyril even insists that the basic s...

Peter, James, and the Question: Who Actually “Ends the Debate”? J. Neil Daniels If you listen carefully to a lot of Catholic apologetics on Acts 15, you can almost hear the script. It goes like this: the council argues; Peter stands up as the unique rock and voice of the Church; he defines the doctrine; everyone falls into line; James simply works out the pastoral details. In that telling, Peter “ends the debate,” and we are meant to see here an early snapshot of Vatican I. The trouble is that Luke’s narrative refuses to cooperate with that script. Take the sequence seriously. After “much debate” (15:6), Peter speaks (15:7–11). His speech is indeed theologically decisive: salvation by grace, one way for Jew and Gentile alike. But Luke does not write, “And after Peter spoke, no one dared to add anything.” He writes: “All the multitude kept silent, and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul as they were relating what signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them”...

The Rabbi in the Workshop: Rethinking Jesus’s Literacy J. Neil Daniels The assumption that Jesus was illiterate because He worked with His hands has been repeated so often that it feels unquestionable. A tekton from Galilee—small village, working-class family—surely He shared the low literacy rates of the period. Yet the Gospels are stubborn. They keep showing Him acting like someone comfortable with written texts, someone who reads Scripture aloud, interprets it on the spot, debates experts, and leaves scribbled words in the dust when silence speaks louder than speech. Take Luke 4. Jesus walks into the synagogue at Nazareth—not to sit quietly, but to read. Luke is strangely matter-of-fact about it. “He stood up to read.” The attendant hands him the Isaiah scroll. Jesus unrolls it, locates a specific text (Isa 61), reads it aloud, and then offers an expository sermon that nearly triggers a riot. There’s no narrative wink, no “surprise, the carpenter can read.” Luke reports the moment ...

A Personal Reminisce J. Neil Daniels  I keep this photo on my Amazon author page—not because it’s particularly striking, but because it captures a moment I didn’t understand until much later. Somewhere around 1984 or ’85, I was seven or eight years old, freshly adopted, sitting at our kitchen table in Arlington, Virginia. Sunday mornings meant The Washington Post spread open like a paper tent, ink smudging my hands. My mother—my adoptive mom, though we never used that qualifier—would slide the comics toward me like a teacher presenting a lesson. “Pick one strip and read it aloud,” she’d say. I hated reading; the letters seemed to fight back. But the comics had color, movement, silly facial expressions. Something about Calvin’s mischief or Snoopy’s existential doghouse angst coaxed me along one word at a time. Looking at that picture now—a lanky boy with a head full of hair leaning over Peanuts and Garfield—it feels like peering into a different lifetime. I was a remedi...

The Trinity of Theological Triage J. Neil Daniels Look at the diagram (from @dotheology on X) for a minute. It’s modeled after the classic Trinity shield, but instead of “Father / Son / Spirit,” you get “Primary / Secondary / Doubtful,” all orbiting around the word “Important.” That’s not cute branding. That’s a quiet confession: not everything we argue about online carries the same theological weight. Some truths are the load-bearing walls of the faith. Some are still weighty, but not ultimate. Some are, frankly, unsteady. And yet all of them live in the same house called “important,” which means we do not get to shrug off doctrine like it’s a hobby. We’re responsible for knowing what we believe and why — and responsible for knowing which hills are Calvary and which hills are just hills. “Primary” sits in red for a reason. Primary doctrines are essential to the gospel, to salvation, to Christianity actually being Christianity: the Triune nature of God, the full deity and full humani...