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God Made Simple: First Concern
At the start of this week, I had the pleasure of participating in a discussion on divine simplicity up at EV Church (NSW Central Coast) with Mark Thompson and James Dolezal (via video). [i] I thought it was a great time. We had a lot of agreement and we all acknowledged the universal desire in orthodox Christian theology to avoid making God a thing of parts: a Trinity of different powers or divergent wills; a God who is partly loving, partly just, partly sovereign, partly limited etc. a God who needs creation to be himself. Of course, there were a differences in the way we approached things. James, who went…
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God in the Flesh: Incarnation Reflections
Last week, I had the great privilege of participating with Mark Thompson and Charles Cleworth in EV Church’s third theology seminar on the Incarnation. We had a good discussion and the staff and visitors asked us excellent questions. I will provide a link to media from the even as it becomes available. But in the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to draw together some of the theological ideas that I tried to stress, both in my paper, and which seemed significant in conversations before and after. There is a little bit of theological terminology here. But if it seems too academic, you can just cut straight to the…
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Reading and Writing – Literal Magic
I recently had the opportunity to talk about “Reading and Writing to the Glory of God” at the RTC in Melbourne. Here is an expanded version of some of what I said. Is there anything closer to magic than reading and writing? The idea that by making some marks on a page, you can send your very thoughts into another person’s brain is bananas. And it gets even wild when you realise it works with dead people too. How can we ever get used to being able to read the minds of people who lived 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia? How is it possible that even then, those people possessed…
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God, Trinity & Jesus
This is discussion paper that I presented at an EV Church symposium in December 2022. The paper summarises some of the main points of my doctoral thesis. it also seeks to bring some of the main points of historic orthodoxy to bear on recent evangelical debates about eternal subordination of God the Son and how Jesus’ human life relates to his eternal sonship. 1. Everything in the Trinity begins with the God the Father. … yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through…
