Begotten in Love

In his contribution to Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions And Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology , Emmanuel Durand offers an Augustinian treatment of the role of the Spirit in the Father-Son relation: Generation is not merely a “mechanical” operation of divine . . . . Continue Reading »

Sacraments and salvation

Kimberly Hope Belcher states the thesis of her Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery early on. She says that the premise of classic Catholic sacramental theology is that God is at work in them. All other definitional discussions are subordinate to this basic . . . . Continue Reading »

Three Loves

Dan Glover offers these expansions on an earlier post where I quoted Edward Vacek’s analysis of the threefold love of God ( agape , philia , eros ). The rest of this post is from Dan. Adding to your comments, perhaps each person of the Godhead serves particularly, though not exclusively, to . . . . Continue Reading »

Invocation to Assent

Vickers ( Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology ) gives a thorough and challenging account of the collapse of Trinitarian theology in seventeenth-century English Protestantism. He thinks that the collapse can be traced to three roots: The appeal to Scripture as . . . . Continue Reading »

Early Trinitarianism

Building on the work of Robert Jenson and especially JND Kelly, Jason Vickers argues in Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology that the proto-creedal affirmations of Trinitarian theology that are found in the various “rules of faith” specifically aim . . . . Continue Reading »

Vestigium trinitatis

“Despite the contemporary belief that ‘the normal sacrificial cult is a cult without revelation or epiphany,’” writes Kimberley Patton in her Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity , “primary evidence suggests that the Greeks believed that the gods both . . . . Continue Reading »

Mode of existence

Barth has been charged with modalism, partly because he chose to use the phrase “mode of existence” rather than the term “person” to describe the three in God. The charge doesn’t stick, mainly because Barth clearly understands what modalism is, and claims that it . . . . Continue Reading »

Exhortation

If you stop breathing for a few minutes, you’ll die. If you don’t eat or drink for a time, you’ll die. You are porous. Bits of the world go in and out of you all the time. If they stop, you can’t last long. This physical fact is a clue to what it means to be human. We are . . . . Continue Reading »

Sense

We can see, hear, taste, touch, smell. Why? Where do senses come from? What’s the theological rationale for sensation? Why this “mediation” of the world through sensible experience? (Or, is that even the right way to ask the question?) My speculative guess that the answer is in . . . . Continue Reading »

Does God act “immediately”?

Every theologian is a negative theologian in the sense that there are certain traditions and theologies that he defines himself against . Protestants have always defined themselves against Catholics, Lutherans against Reformed and vice versa, and within each tradition there are subtraditions that . . . . Continue Reading »