Tag: Confronting

The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our…

God is not “a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind.”[1] And yet, enter the fray of theological social media, enter the faculty lounges across many seminaries and divinity schools, or simply attempt to learn of God with more depth by reading theology books unawares (i.e., without critical resource to know otherwise), and you will end up coming up against a notion of God that has nothing do with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Whether that notion be informed by the scholasticism of Aristotelian or scholastic vintage, or it be of more…

There is a lot of talk about ‘substance theology’ these days, and in the past days. Indeed, substance language marks classical theism as the way to talk God at least since the days of Thomas [of Aquino], if not further back since the Greeks started using the language of ousia or ‘being’ for talking God (but that was a little different from the Thomist heritage in the sense that they often used ousia as synonymous with hypostases or ‘persons’ and vice versa). No matter what period past to think and talk God in terms of substance has become considered the…