During his earthly life and ministry, Jesus was anointed by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, and acted in the Spirit. This essay will examine the biblical testimony to Christ’s experience of the Holy Spirit during his earthly life and ministry in light of the doctrinal commitments of a classical Christian … Read more
Though divine forgiveness is a central feature of the Bible’s story, scholars disagree about its composition. What, precisely, is the nature of the forgiveness God extends to mankind? Some believe forgiveness can be individually and unilaterally given, requiring only the wronged person to carry out the action (i.e. Jonathan Rutledge). Others see it as an … Read more
Though various theologians like Fred Sanders, Michael Bird, Stephen Holmes, and D. Glenn Butner have argued that the creator-creature distinction implies the Trinity cannot archetypally ground human social relations, this paper questions whether Scripture might encourage us to look at the Trinity not only as grounding our redemption—in the first place—but also as grounding a … Read more
The church uses the doctrine of the Trinity for many things that we might call internal to the church: catechesis, systematics, worship, spiritual formation, and hermeneutics. But the doctrine also has a function toward those outside the Christian faith, especially in apologetics. This paper is a high-level survey of the aspects of trinitarian doctrine that … Read more
While the predominant understanding of classical incomprehensibility requires Trinitarian persons who are absolutely non-personalist (see, for example, in Stephen Holmes), this paper will argue for a classical incomprehensibility that allows for a paradox: persons who are non-personalist, in one sense, and personalist, in another. This understanding of “paradoxical incomprehensibility” is theologically preferable to “absolute incomprehensibility” … Read more
In recent years many theologians have abandoned classical theism in an attempt to rescue God from the charge of evil. The desire to reach those who are mad at God or even deny the existence of God because of some tragedies that struck close to home has motivated some to insist that the goodness of … Read more
Clarity about the gospel is a crucial issue for evangelicalism, and it has been a point of considerable dispute in recent decades. This paper will argue that clarifying the content and nature of the gospel is properly a systematic theological or dogmatic question. It is not resolved simply by examining the New Testament use of … Read more
In a Babel-like age in which man increasingly seeks to decrease the gap between man and God, there is a need for evangelical theologians to defend and define a biblical understanding of man’s existence and limitations. In theology proper, many theologians have used the way of eminence and the way of negation as a way … Read more
Most of the recent Reformed literature on the beatific vision argues that there is a distinctively Reformed approach to that doctrine which privileges Christology in a unique way (e.g., Horton (2007), McDonald (2012), Allen (2015, 2018), Boersma (2018), Sutanto (2024)). Contained within that argument is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, premise that the traditional Western … Read more
Evangelicalism has developed unified doctrines on God, Christ, salvation, and Scripture, but not on creation. Most evangelicals recognize that Genesis 1 is historical narrative, but many disappointingly limit historical narrative interpretation at some point. The inspiration of Scripture extends to grammar, suggesting that if we interpret all of Genesis 1 as reporting sequential historical events, … Read more