Will the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 1
Within a year of my profession of faith I came into contact with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The owner of the local Christian bookstore gave me a copy of The Cost of Discipleship. After giving me a brief...
View ArticleWright Wrong on Adam
In March Intervarsity Press plans to release a book by John Walton with a contribution from N. T. Wright titled, The Lost World of Adam and Eve. Wright’s excursus follows Walton’s chapter titled,...
View ArticleWill the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 2
In our last post we concluded that juxtaposing Bonhoeffer against himself might not be the most useful way to determine whether the man was a pietistic evangelical or a German liberal. So, how do we...
View ArticleWill the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 3
Kant’s Copernican Revolution might have been better described as a theological warhead aimed directly at theology. The immediate epistemological carnage caused by Kantian Transcendentalism can be...
View ArticleThe Need to Remember Warfield
On December 24, 1920 Benjamin B. Warfield fell ill after being struck with angina pectoris. He died on February 16, 1921. Why should we pause to remember a Princeton theologian who has been with the...
View ArticleWill the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 4
Having begun with Kant’s concept of the transcendental unity of apperception in order to establish God’s immanence Bonhoeffer was brought up against a potential philosophical problem. Kant’s...
View ArticleWill the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 5
Speaking theologically, what was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Was he a German liberal or might we label him a conservative evangelical Christian? Bonhoeffer’s use of Kantian Transcendentalism as a theological...
View ArticlePastoral Lessons from My Betters, Part 1
I was sinking fast. It was my third year of church planting and I was having one of those “seminary didn’t prepare me for this!” moments. If memory serves me, I was taking what felt like my last gulp...
View ArticlePastoral Lessons from My Betters, Part #2
By the fourth year of my first church plant the congregation was in financial jeopardy. Members of my denomination’s Home Mission Board had informed me with all solemnity that it would take ten years...
View ArticlePastoral Lessons from My Betters, Part 3
Benjamin B. Warfield once said that the Reformation “inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.”[1] Warfield, as he was...
View ArticlePastoral Lessons from My Betters, Part 4
It was in the fall of the year 2000. My professor had strolled rather awkwardly into the classroom with a very large stack of papers cradled in his arm. He simply looked at us as he began tossing them...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #1
When Karl Barth was once asked to comment on the reception of his theology in America, he noted that a bright young American scholar named Robert Jenson had rightly grasped and interpreted his...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #2
I stated my basic contention in the last post. It was simply this, Robert Jenson, adopting Barth’s theological notion of time and eternity and taking that understanding to its logical conclusion, has...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #3
By now it should be understood by the reader that for Jenson, God is the act of utterance.[1] For Jenson, as I argued in my last post, God is to be identified by and as wholly temporalized in the...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #4
In our last post we left two questions begging to be asked. First, how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? Second, how is he able to identify God as ontologically...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #5
In the last post we asked if Jenson had gone beyond Barth. Has he temporalized eternity? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he really achieved a...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #6
In our last post, (a while back!) I argued that Jenson had in fact compromised the creator creature distinction and I said that we would flesh that out a bit, which is what I plan to do here. So, if...
View ArticleGod After God: Jenson After Barth, Part #7
Perhaps you will remember from the last post, according to Jenson, Israel’s hope, as well as our own, is for participation in God’s own reality, which is nothing less than deification.[1] Working this...
View ArticleDealing with the Sin of the Double Life, Part #1
Simple images have a way of simplifying stories. Movies have perfected this technique. Think of oranges rolling randomly about in the back of the vehicle. They are just fruit in chaos! But the image of...
View ArticleDealing with the Sin of the Double Life, Part 2
While a senior in high school, I was pressed into playing the part of a court jester in our annual Canterbury festival. I was prepared with the perfect objection—I was unable to juggle. What jester...
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