It is possible a grieving Christian has never asked whether God possesses passive potency. Suffering saints ask whether God cares. Does God remain distant from the hospital room, the grave, the battlefield, and the abused? Does the Father of mercies look upon human anguish without being touched by it? The doctrine of divine impassibility often … Continue reading The God Who Cannot Be Overcome: A Scriptural, Dogmatic, and Historical Defense of Divine Impassibility
Bible
The Warm Comfort of the Unchanging Impassible God
A strange suspicion has settled into modern Christian thought: if God cannot suffer, then he cannot love. If God’s emotional life isn’t volatile, then God isn’t really “involved” with my life and care about me. This modern, dare I say novel(?), view is also based on Scriptures which seem to show God’s emotions changing repeatedly … Continue reading The Warm Comfort of the Unchanging Impassible God
HOW WE LOST THE HAPPY GOD: A HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE’S DECLINE
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him… What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.” Nietzsche’s parable was not a just a sociological report. It was a theological diagnosis. The modern West, he argued, had not merely ceased to … Continue reading HOW WE LOST THE HAPPY GOD: A HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE’S DECLINE
Substitution or Participation?
For a growing number of Christians, substitution has become a suspicious word. It sounds too violent, judicial, mechanical, and too tied to forms of Protestant scholasticism that seemed to describe salvation as little more than a legal transaction occurring somewhere above human life rather than within it. Many younger theologians and pastors now prefer different … Continue reading Substitution or Participation?
Exegetical Foundations for Divine Plenitude
Any theological account of divine plenitude must begin with Scripture’s own depiction of God as infinitely alive, blessed, and communicative in his goodness. The Christian doctrine of divine plenitude does not arise from metaphysical speculation. Instead, the Christian doctrine of divine plenitude (the overflowing of God's perfect life into blessedness) emerges from the biblical data. … Continue reading Exegetical Foundations for Divine Plenitude
Divine Plenitude: The Overflowing Life of God
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
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
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
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
Exegetical Theology: a Methodological Proposal
Introduction: Recovering the Order of Theology Christian theology has always required method even if it is not acknowledged . From the patristic era onward, the church has wrestled with the relationship between Scripture and doctrinal formulation. Yet in modern theological practice, the disciplines have frequently drifted apart. In the early centuries, doctrinal controversies were exegetical … Continue reading Exegetical Theology: a Methodological Proposal
Donnie's Dogmatics 