Category Archives: Theology

An Introduction to Jonathan Edwards

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Joe Rigney is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Worldview at Bethlehem College and Seminary where he teaches undergraduates in the Christian Worldview Program and courses on Jonathan Edwards. Here is a lecture of his which provides an introduction to the life, theology, writings and legacy of Jonathan Edwards.

Lecture time-markers —

04:14 — 1. Edwards on the Trinity

14:06 — 2. Edwards on Creation

18:27 — 3. Edwards on God’s End in Creation

32:06 — Conclusion

Q&A time-markers —

34:04 — Edwards on typology

37:56 — First recommended Edwards books to read

39:55 — Edwards on God’s direct creation and the place of causality

43:00 — Edwards and the classical tradition (Aristotle, Augustine, etc)

45:27 — Dante, Locke, and Edwards’s influences

47:02 — Edwards on spiders

49:14 — Edwards’s faults and weaknesses

51:36 — The Great Awakening and how Edwards processed it

56:46 — The Enlightenment and its influence on Edwards

59:40 — Edwards’s legacy

Theology Night with Sinclair Ferguson & R.C. Sproul

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On January 20, 2012, Saint Andrew’s was the location for “Theology Night with Sinclair Ferguson and R.C. Sproul.” It was a relaxed and informative evening where two notable theologians and pastors answered questions submitted by online viewers and those present in the audience. Topics addressed included the doctrines of grace, when to leave a local church, Tim Tebow, dispensationalism, free will, and the peccability or impeccability of Jesus.

You can watch it here.

If only T. D. Jakes was asked….

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If you have been reading the Evangelical blogs over the last 24 hours, it would have been hard to miss the talk and chatter about the “Elephant Room 2” controversy over whether Bishop T. D. Jakes has in fact renounced modalism and embraced orthodox Trinitarian theology. There seems to be mass confusion, which, most regretably, is what I thought might happen. The questions asked of Jakes needed to be rigorous and very specific. This was a time when great clarity was needed. If Jakes still embraced modalism in any form, he would need to be rejected as a heretic. If not, then he needed to make it clear that he considered his former belief heresy.

This of course, is not what happened and this is why, after all the talk and bluster has taken place and the smoke has settled, mass confusion abounds on the day after the dialog has taken place.

My friend, Dr. James White, author of the book “The Forgotten Trinity” has boiled it down to just one simple question that he believes should have been asked of the Bishop:

“Sir, did the Son, as a divine Person, distinct from the Father as a divine Person, exist prior to the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem?”

Jakes’ answer to this question (as stated) would have revealed all we needed to know. Sadly, this question was never asked.

For a full discussion of the issues here, I would invite you to watch this Dividing Line program with Dr. James White:

The Pharisees’ Problem

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“The Pharisees’ problem was not that they were too concerned with orthodox teaching, but that they had invented their own orthodoxy. Jesus condemned them for replacing and modifying the clear truth of Scripture with their own traditions (Matthew 15:1-9). They were the chief theological miscreants of their day.

So how did Jesus treat them? Did He show them love—i.e., did He obey the Second Great Commandment in His dealings with them? Of course.

What did that love entail? First and foremost, Jesus declared the truth to them. He also frequently delivered public rebukes for the errors that threatened to damn them. He castigated them. He occasionally held them up to public ridicule. He obviously valued their souls more than their feelings. That is what authentic love looks like. In other words, Christ, not Rodney King, is the paragon of perfect love.

The vast majority of Pharisees didn’t heed Jesus’ warnings, of course. The smug or snide ones might have even claimed it was because He didn’t “have a relationship based upon love.” It was nonetheless the right thing for Him to correct their false teaching and warn others of the danger posed by their error.”

– Phil Johnson

Not the full story…

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John Wesley said, “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” There is some truth there but its not the full story. Creation took place before there ever was a prayer meeting. God made His plans long before anything else ever existed. God gave a people to His Son in eternity past who in time will come to Him (John 6:37) and He did so when no one asked Him to. God is not merely a responder, He is a master planner. He is found even by those who never sought Him (Romans 10:20). Lets always be people of prayer but let us be forever thankful that God is not limited to our prayer life before He can act in this world; otherwise we would be Sovereign and not Him.

Question: If God is Sovereign, why pray? Answer: It is BECAUSE God is Sovereign that we do pray. He is Lord of all and can change things, even putting it on our hearts to pray that He would do so.

The Earliest Testimony of the Church: Jesus Is God

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Jaroslav Pelikan:

The oldest surviving sermon of the Christian church after the New Testament opened with the words: “Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God, as the judge of living and dead. And we ought not to belittle our salvation; for when we belittle him, we expect also to receive little.”

The oldest surviving account of the death of a Christian martyr contained the declaration: “It will be impossible for us to forsake Christ . . . or to worship any other. For him, being the Son of God, we adore, but the martyrs . . . we cherish.”

The oldest surviving pagan report about the church described Christians as gathering before sunrise and “singing a hymn to Christ as to [a] god.”

The oldest surviving liturgical prayer of the church was a prayer addressed to Christ: “Our Lord, come!”

Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that “God” was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.

—Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 173.

HT: JT

Why We Must Be Unapologetically Theological

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Kevin DeYoung wrote the following at his blog and agree especially with his conclusion that “Churches will still come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But “atheological,” or worse yet “anti-theological,” should not be one of them.”:

If I’m not mistaken, our church has a reputation for being quite theological. I know this is why many people have come to our church. And I imagine it’s why some people have left, or never checked us out in the first place. But no church should apologize for talking about and loving theology. Now–and this is an important caveat–if we are arrogant with our theology, or if our doctrinal passion is just about intellectual gamesmanship, or we are all out of proportioned in our affections for less important doctrines, then may the Lord rebuke us. We should not be surprised theology gets a bad name in such circumstances.

But when it comes to thinking on, rejoicing in, and building a church upon sound biblical truth, we should all long for a richly theological church.

I could cite many reasons for preaching theologically and many reasons for wanting to pastor a congregation that loves theology. Let me mention six:

1. God has revealed himself to us in his word and given us his Spirit that we might understand the truth. Obviously, you don’t need to master every theme in Scripture in order to be a Christian. God is gracious to save lots of us with lots of gaps in our understanding. But if we have a Bible, not to mention an embarrassment of riches when it comes to resources in English, why wouldn’t we want to understand as much of God’s self-revelation as possible? Theology is getting more of God. Don’t you want your church to know God better?

2. The New Testament places a high value on discerning truth from error. There is a deposit of truth that must be guarded. False teaching must be placed out of bounds. Good teaching must be promoted and defended. This is not the concern of some soulless Ph.D. candidate wasting away in front of microfiche. This is the passion of the Apostles and the Lord Jesus himself who commended the church at Ephesus for being intolerant of false teachers and hating the deeds of the Nicolaitans.

3. The ethical commands of the New Testament are predicated on theological propositions. So many of Paul’s letters have a twofold structure. The beginning chapters lay out doctrine and the latter chapters exhort us to obedience. Doctrine and life are always connected in the Bible. It’s in view of God’s mercies, in view of all the massive theological realities of Romans 1-11, that we are called to lay down our lives as living sacrifices in Romans 12. Know doctrine, know life. No doctrine, no life.

4. Theological categories enable us to more fully and more deeply rejoice in God’s glory. Simple truths are wonderful. It is good for us to sing simple songs like “God is good. All the time!” If you sing that in sincere faith, the Lord is very pleased. But he is also pleased when we can sing and pray about how exactly he has been good to us in the plan of salvation and in the scope of salvation history. He is pleased when we can glory in the completed work of Christ, and rest in his all-encompassing providence, and marvel at his infinity and aseity, when we can delight in his holiness and mediate on his three-ness and one-ness and stand in awe at his omniscience and omnipotence. These theological categories are not meant to give us bigger heads, but bigger hearts that worship deeper and higher because of what we’ve seen in God.

5. Theology helps us more fully and more deeply rejoice in the blessings that are ours in Christ. Again, it is a sweet thing to know that Jesus saves you from your sins. There’s no better news than that in the whole world. But how much fuller and deeper will your delight be when you understand that salvation means election to the praise of God’s grace, expiation to cover your sins, propitiation to turn away divine wrath, redemption to purchase you for God, justification before the judgment seat of God, adoption into God’s family, on-going sanctification by the Spirit, and promised glorification at the end of the age? If God has given us so many varied and multi-layered blessings in Christ, wouldn’t it help you and honor him to understand what they are?

6. Even (or is it especially?) non-Christians need good theology. They may not thrill to hear a dry lecture on the ordo salutis. But who wants dry lectures on anything? If you can talk winsomely, passionately, and simply about the blessings of effectual calling, regeneration, and adoption, and how all these blessings are found in Christ, and how the Christian life is nothing more or less than being who we are in Christ, and how this means God really does want us to be true to ourselves, but ourselves as we were born again not as we were born in sin–if you give non-Christians all of this, and give it to them plainly, you’ll be giving them a whole lot of theology. And, if the Spirit of God is at work, they just might come back looking for more.

There is no reason for any church to be anything other than robustly theological. Churches will still come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But “atheological,” or worse yet “anti-theological,” should not be one of them.

Time, Matter and the Eternal Love of God

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An excerpt from Dr. R. C. Sproul’s book, Loved by God.

When Genesis speaks of a beginning, it is referring to the advent of the universe in time and space. It is not positing a beginning to God but rather to the beginning of the creative work of God. One of the most enigmatic questions of philosophy and theology relates to the nature of time. Was the universe created in time, or was it created along with time? Did time exist before creation, or did it come into being with creation? Most classical theologians affirm that time correlates with creation. That is, before matter was created, time, at least as we know it, did not exist. How one approaches this question of the origin of time is usually bound up with how one understands the nature of time. Some see time not as an objective reality but merely as a category or construction of the mind.

However we conceive of time, we will agree that the ordinary manner by which we measure time requires a relationship between matter and motion. A simple clock uses hands that move around the face of a dial. We measure time by the motion of these hands. Or we may use an hourglass, which measures the passing of sand through a narrow aperture in the glass. The sundial measures time by the movement of a shadow. There are many devices to measure time, but in the final analysis they all rely on some sort of motion relative to some type of matter.

If there is no matter, we cannot measure motion. If we cannot measure motion, we cannot measure time. However, just because we cannot measure time without matter does not mean that without matter time does not exist. Genesis merely asserts that the universe had a beginning. It does not explicitly declare that time began with the universe. That concept is derived via speculative philosophy. The philosophical concerns are usually linked to our broader understanding of the nature of God. Especially when we declare with Scripture that God is eternal, the question of His relationship to time arises. Does His eternality mean that He is somehow outside of time, that He is timeless? Or does His eternality mean that He exists in an endless dimension of time?

However we answer this question, we conclude that God Himself never had a beginning. He exists infinitely with respect to space and eternally with respect to time. His existence has neither a starting point nor an ending point. The dimensions of His existence are from everlasting to everlasting. This means that He always has been and always will be.

In the Beginning God

Though God Himself had no beginning, nevertheless He was already there in the beginning. He antedates the created order. When we affirm that God is eternal, we are also saying that He possesses the attribute of aseity, or self-existence. This means that God eternally has existed of Himself and in Himself. He is not a contingent being. He did not derive from some other source. He is not dependent on any power outside Himself in order to exist. He has no father or mother. He is not an effect of some antecedent cause. In a word, He is not a creature. No creature has the power of being in and of itself. All creatures are contingent, derived and dependent. This is the essence of their creatureliness.

In the Beginning God Created

Thinkers hostile to theism have sought every means imaginable to provide a rational alternative to the notion of an eternal self-existent deity. Some have argued for an eternal universe, though with great difficulty. Usually the temporal beginning of the universe is granted but with a reluctance to assign its cause to a self-existent, eternal being. The usual alternative is some sort of self-creation, which, in whatever form it takes, retreats into irrationality and absurdity. To assert the self-creation of anything is to leap into the abyss of the absurd because for something to create itself, it would have to exist before it existed to do the job. It would have to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. Some speak of self-creation in terms of spontaneous generation, which is just another name for self-creation. This would involve the logically impossible event of something coming from nothing. If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing. Even that statement is problematic because there can never be nothing; if nothing ever was, then it would be something and not nothing.

Understanding the eternality of God is important because without some understanding of this attribute, our understanding of the love of God will be impoverished. This is so because the love of God must be understood as an eternal love. Just as He is from everlasting to everlasting, so His love is also from everlasting to everlasting. His is not a fickle love that waxes hot and cold over time. His love has a constancy about it that transcends all human forms of love. Just as human beings often fall in love, they also often fall out of love. This is not the case with the love of God.

If God’s love is eternal, we must ask whom or what did God love from all eternity? What was the object of that love? In the first instance we see that God’s eternal love had Himself as both the subject and object of His love. As the subject, God did the loving. Yet at the same time He was the object of His own love. Though this love was a kind of self-love, it was by no means a selfish love.