God is powerful. God is sovereign. God is immutable. Yet one can affirm all of them while still imagining God as fundamentally closed, static, or solitary. The result is a doctrinally correct deity who nevertheless feels emotionally and metaphysically thin. The church’s classical tradition resisted this reduction with remarkable consistency. Scripture and the great theologians … Continue reading Divine Plenitude: The Overflowing Life of God
Author: Donnie L. DeBord
The Sacrifice That Answers the Problem: How The Garden Sacrifice, Leviticus, and Isaiah 53 Prepare Us For the Cross
Christ's cross did not arrive at Calvary without preparation. Before Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, God was training his people to understand his eternal plan for what would happen on that Friday afternoon. God prepared his people through images of blood, through priests, through altars, through the repeated and irreversible death of innocent animals in … Continue reading The Sacrifice That Answers the Problem: How The Garden Sacrifice, Leviticus, and Isaiah 53 Prepare Us For the Cross
The Covenantal Framework of Atonement
Why Representative Headship Is the Key to Understanding the Cross Many modern misunderstandings of penal substitutionary atonement arise from a failure to grasp the Bible’s covenantal and representative logic. Contemporary Western individualism often assumes that persons exist as isolated moral units whose actions belong to themselves alone. Yet Scripture regularly presents humanity in corporate and … Continue reading The Covenantal Framework of Atonement
What is Atonement?
What is the atonement? What is penal substitutionary atonement?
DID GOD REALLY CHANGE? PRINCIPLES FOR READING ABOUT GOD
The noble task of reading about God and discussing God must begin with humility and be guided by the entirety of Scripture as it describes God with careful attention to how it describes God. God is not an object within the world to be measured, mastered, or comprehended as creatures comprehend other creatures. He is … Continue reading DID GOD REALLY CHANGE? PRINCIPLES FOR READING ABOUT GOD
What Is A Person? Recovering a Theological Grammar for Speaking of God
The word person feels simple. We use it regularly without thought. Yet in Christian theology it carries a precision that everyday language cannot sustain. If we import modern assumptions into Trinitarian doctrine, we distort the biblical data concerning the triune God. The term “person,” in large part, arose within the church’s effort to confess the … Continue reading What Is A Person? Recovering a Theological Grammar for Speaking of God
Firm at the Center and Gentle at the Edges: Navigating Opinions While Pursuing Truth and the Unity of the Church
The line between truth and opinion is not thin. It is not negotiable. Truth is what God has spoken and commanded. Opinion is what he has left open, entrusting his people to judge with wisdom. Our judgmental restraint obedience and humility. It is not weakness. The distinction between what God said and how I feel … Continue reading Firm at the Center and Gentle at the Edges: Navigating Opinions While Pursuing Truth and the Unity of the Church
Remember the Theological Context of Each Text: The Capstone of Exegesis
Most of us learned to read the Bible by asking necessary questions: Who wrote this? When? What did the words mean in their original setting? These questions matter, bu they are not sufficient.We can master the historical background, chart every verbal parallel, and diagram Greek clauses with surgical precision, yet still sense that the text … Continue reading Remember the Theological Context of Each Text: The Capstone of Exegesis
Divine Simplicity and the Blessed Life of God
There are doctrines that stand quietly in the background of Christian theology, doing immense conceptual labor while receiving little devotion in return. The doctrine of divine simplicity is one of these. It appears austere at first glance. Yet when read with Scripture in one hand and the Fathers in the other, it becomes luminous. Simplicity … Continue reading Divine Simplicity and the Blessed Life of God
Thinking Through Scheeben on God’s Actuality
III. There is a still deeper and more exhaustive conception of the Divine Substance contained in the expressions, “God is His own existence;” “God’s essence is existence;” “God is Being;” ὁ ὤν, He Who is, Jehovah. The Schoolmen express this by saying, “God is a pure act (actus purus);” that is, pure actuality without any … Continue reading Thinking Through Scheeben on God’s Actuality
Donnie's Dogmatics 