Theologia et Vita

Saul falls in with a band of ecstatic prophets and starts prophesying himself, transformed on the spot into someone else entirely (1 Sam. 10:1-13). Samson tears a lion apart bare-handed when the Spirit rushes on him (Judg. 14:6). These are the images most people carry of the Spirit in the Old Testament: sudden, overwhelming, a little frightening. They are not wrong, but they are a small slice of something much larger. Of the 389 occurrences of ruach in the Hebrew Bible, only 107 refer to the divine Spirit at all, and John Levison notes that of those, only a smattering thrum with untrammeled impulse.¹ Lee Roy Martin, surveying the same material, gives up trying to force it into one category and instead reads it through five: Yahweh's Spirit as savior, sanctifier, empowerer, healer, and the one who rests on Israel's coming king.² The real portrait is stranger and more interesting than Saul on the ground or Samson with a jawbone in his hand. Start where the canon starts. "The...

  Billy Graham fielded the question often enough that his answer settled into a formula: if it would make you happy, and it isn't beneath God's goodness, then probably yes.¹ It is the most quoted sentence in the entire literature on animal eschatology, and it comes from a pastoral letter, not from anything Graham would have staked his ministry on. The Second London Confession, closer to my own tradition than Westminster, says nothing about animals after death. Neither does Westminster. That silence is not an oversight. It reflects a judgment older than either confession: that when Scripture talks about resurrection and glory, it has one species in view. Thomas Aquinas gave that judgment its sharpest form. The human soul, he argued, exists independently of the body ( per se subsistens ): it can understand without depending on any bodily organ, which is why it survives the body's corruption. The soul of a brute animal has no such independence. Sensation, appetite, locomotion,...

  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...

  At Westminster in 2016, "Christotelic" was the name of the error. Peter Lillback's introduction to Seeing Christ in All of Scripture describes the recent faculty dispute as a contest between a view that set Christ at the organic center of the whole Bible and one that "merely located Christ as the goal of Old Testament revelation."¹ Two years later Daniel Block used the same word for the remedy, reminding readers that every passage takes part in God's agenda that culminates in Christ. My own method uses it that way too. In The Craft of Systematic Theology I call the Christotelic reading of the Old Testament "a canonical necessity," since Scripture has its "hermeneutical center of gravity in the person and work of Christ."² So the word needs defending. A Christotelic hermeneutic reads the Old Testament forward, along lines the prophets themselves laid down, toward a Christ they wrote about. Westminster's worry was fair, and Tremper ...