Archive for February 2023
Podcast Throwback: Should We Interpret the Bible Theologically?
Is it possible to approach the text of Scripture neutral, without a theological framework? What dangers exist in neglecting theology in the exegetical process? Should creeds and confessions throughout the history of Christianity play any role in biblical interpretation? What are appropriate ways to utilize dogmatic categories in exegesis? Why are the disciplines of theology…
Read MoreThe Beatific Vision and Augustine
The visio dei—vision of God—or often rendered as the beatific vision consists of seeing God. The beatific vision consists of living, experiencing happiness, and true blessedness. The beatific description of one’s vision corresponds to the Latin term, beatus, which is rendered as makarios in Greek and asher in Hebrew. The vision consists of one’s sight…
Read MoreMethodological Naturalism and Divine Inspiration
According to the confession of the Christian church, the Bible is an inspired book. This is the inescapable fact confronting anyone who wants to interpret the Bible. All agree that this is a religious text used for millennia by religious communities, first Jewish, then Jewish and Christian. But that tells us only that certain people…
Read MoreNew Credo Podcast! Can we be Reformed and Scholastic?
Reformed and Scholastic are often considered antithetical to one another, as if the use of the scholastic method or the retrieval of its philosophy and theology is a betrayal of the Reformation. Such a popular narrative is more fiction than fact, a convenient caricature that misrepresents some of the Reformed heritage of the sixteenth through…
Read MoreCan we be Reformed and Scholastic?
Reformed and Scholastic are often considered antithetical to one another, as if the use of the scholastic method or the retrieval of its philosophy and theology is a betrayal of the Reformation. Such a popular narrative is more fiction than fact, a convenient caricature that misrepresents the Reformed heritage of the sixteenth through the eighteenth…
Read MoreOn Reading
Words cascade across the page and deluge our eyes as we try to take them all in. Such a flood often overwhelms students who try to stay afloat amidst the ocean of letters and words and prompts them to ask, “How do I keep up with all of this reading?” Other questions swirl about such…
Read MoreThe Natural Desire of Human Beings for Beatitude
Thomas Aquinas holds that human beings have a natural desire for beatitude with God in the next life. Yet the attainment of this beatitude is beyond natural human intellectual powers. Ultimate fulfillment for human beings thus seems to be something that is not attainable; yet, Aquinas argues that it is possible for human beings to…
Read MoreMagic, Good Spells, and Poetry in Service of Praise: Part 2
This is why describing what happens when words come together to communicate truth, goodness, and beauty as magic is not an exaggeration. There is a deep, metaphysical correspondence between language and all of reality, and as I said before, poetry is a way of tapping into that correspondence at an incomprehensibly deep level. Poetry in…
Read MoreMagic, Good Spells, and Poetry in Service of Praise: Part 1
I do not read nearly as much poetry as I ought, but I read enough to know it is nourishing to the soul. There is something about poetry that allows one to tap into the deep undercurrents of reality. If “the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaim his handiworks” (Ps…
Read MoreThe Credo Fellow Bookclub with Scott Swain
Credo Fellow Scott Swain (Ph.D., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is President and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Swain has served on the RTS faculty since 2006, having previously taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He serves as co-general editor of two…
Read MoreChristians Need to See God
Theology in the Bible is always pastoral. It is spoken into the real circumstances of life. Scripture contains laws for a real nation, prophecies for real exiles and epistles for real churches. Therefore, you cannot be satisfied with just knowing what the truth is. You must know how that truth impacts church life. I suspect…
Read MoreLearning to Read a Confession of Faith in Historical Context
It is often said that the three most important rules to purchasing real estate are location, location, location. A similar maxim is true for good historical theology—context, context, context. The best explanations of the doctrine of the Westminster Standards must rest upon the testimony of the time. Such a contextual reading of the Standards will…
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