When church people ask me what to read on the Trinity, I start w/the shortest & easiest good book & then move up the ladder. This brand new book is now my starting point. Under 100 pages, easy reading level, sharp focus on the theological main points. unionpublishing.org/product/the-tr… Fairbairn manages to cover the territory in an unrushed way, at an introductory level, just suggesting that there's a lot more exegesis and historical theology out there. Did I mention it's brief? Really couldn't get shorter without becoming a pamphlet.

Generative AI can produce mediocre undergrad essays. The people most excited (pro & con) are people who, I swear, think producing essays is the aim of education. I thought we all knew essays were the means to an end. Who could value them as ends? They're never great documents. I don't mean that as an insult to undergrad essays. I've been closely involved in their care & nurture. What I mean is, there is no demand or appetite for these documents outside of the sealed ecosystem of college. Nobody steals them for use in any other economy.

L.A. Theology Conference 2023 was great. We made some public announcements there of what's coming next. Websites & official words will follow in due course, but let me break the news a bit more publicly than we did on site last week. 1. LATC will be switching to meeting every other year: 2025, 2027, etc. We've had a great time doing 9 annual conferences in a row (with time off for pandemic), but will be spacing them out more from now on.

A Christmas thread (also available at fredfredfred.com/2022/12/of-the…)
When you consider the Trinitarian background of the incarnation, you usually summon to mind one of two possible mental frameworks. 1/19 First is the "one God in three persons" framework, which involves thinking of how each person of the Trinity is fully God, but none are each other. 2/19

Once (2002) I had a student who hadn't learned to write well. We struggled 3 semesters in a row over composition, revision, everything. Inexplicable diction, rambling sentences, formless paragraphs, theses that tripped over their own dull incoherence. But then one day... She turned in a sophomore essay that drew together all the elements of writing in service to a great, creative insight. My heart sank. Writers don't just invent themselves. It had to be plagiarism. Late at night, I went over to the office for hard copies of her previous papers.

1/8 “The Word became flesh,” and “he became a curse for us.” These two claims, from John 1:14 and Galatians 3:13 respectively, use the same verb (became) to explain how Jesus brought about redemption. But surely Jesus didn’t “become flesh” and “become a curse” in the same way. 2/8 To become flesh is to take human nature into personal union, to assume human nature for salvation, for its healing and renewal. But to become a curse is not to take a curse into personal union for its healing and renewal; it makes no sense to talk about saving a curse.

This month I'm co-teaching an intensive 3-week course for 41 @TorreyHonors undergrads in Cambridge. Full days of seeing the sights, punting, cycling, etc. Here's a thread of the books that will be dominating my thought life & twitter feed for the duration. The curriculum is based on deep study of one book of the Bible, worked out in dialogue w/local authors, by which I mean Cantabrigians of one sort or another. The goal is Great Books Lite (short texts suitable for summer intensive) to open up Ephesians & Cambridge.

Finished writing a pretty clean book manuscript today. Now for proofreading, fixing footnotes, & trimming a few thousand words. It's a short book on the Holy Spirit, & though I'm very late with it, now it turns out I'm racing to turn it in by Pentecost. I plan out books using analytic diagrams. Very important to me to get the visual outline down so I can picture the form of the project. Often I redraw these several times in the early stages. As I finish with sections, I highlight them on the diagram so I can watch it fill up.

Summer sale at St. Vlad's. I want to testify that their Popular Patristics series has made it possible for me to teach theology the right way, w/primary texts from classic church fathers. Modern translations, affordable, compact, sound but not overwhelming intros & notes. Top 10:

https://twitter.com/SVSPress/status/1531620411007455233

#10: On Pascha by Melito of Sardis. A gripping sermon on the passover fulfilled in Christ. Short enough to reread regularly. Melito's clipped, dramatic style makes the Greek easy to use (practically a vocab drill). Melito was born ca 100! Way back. svspress.com/on-pascha-seco…

Patristic as noun. OK, this is just a fussy usage note, but I do editing work & grading, where precision matters. It's not correct to call a church father a patristic. Seems like it would be, since we call medieval writers scholastics, & we can call monks monastics. But OED: 'Patristics' (n) (coined in 19th-c English from German Patristik) is a field of study of a certain kind of ancient figure, not a kind of ancient figure. Athanasius was not a patristic, but you study him in Patristics. Harnack was not a patristic, but worked in Patristics.

I can easily sing "How Deep the Father's Love for Us" w/a clear theological conscience. Always have. What do I do when I get to the line, "the Father turns his face away?" I instinctively interpret it charitably, in the high-trust environment of my local church. Does this line from the 1990 song drift too close to suggesting that Father & Son are separable, at odds, broken up? A bit. But if I've heard good trinitarian theology at church, I know in advance not to hear the line that way.

The @100DaysofDante project has reached the 2nd book of the Divine Comedy, Purgatorio. I teach Purgatorio every year with & to evangelicals at @TorreyHonors College, & want to share something about why Protestants really, really ought to read this book. 1/9 To start w/the obvious: I don't believe in Purgatory & neither should you. It's a thing "vainly invented, & grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God," as the 39 Articles rightly say. For those who believe as I do, why read this book? 2/9

Every so often I get to teach the kids at church (K-5) the intro lesson before they head off to their main classes. Okay, "every so often" means when the Trinity rolls around in our sequence of Core Concepts. Here's the 5 minute lesson I taught this time: (1/14) Core Concept 4 is my favorite! "God eternally exists as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." What I love about this is that even though I know what it means, it reminds me that God is more than I can understand, and greater than I can grasp. (2/14)

Father, Son, & Spirit are the almighty God, having the identical divine power & authority over creation. If you take a formal relational structure of power & authority & import it into the life of God, using it to distinguish between Father & Son, you are going to have problems. The error is especially tempting if you start w/a theology of what sonship is in general in the Bible, and then claim it must apply to the unique Son. Sons are younger than dad, have moms, start out smol, obey, etc. None of these characterize the unique Son.

Question for Reformation scholars. Calvin has a celebrated passage about union with Christ in which (without saying so) he anatomizes the Apostles' Creed and explains how each thing it says of Christ is a source of saving power to us. Here's the 1559 version (II:16.19): Well, Bullinger makes the same exact move in Decades I:8, a sermon on the creed. He ends that sermon by gathering up and focusing on salvation in Christ, taking up each phrase (Jesus, Christ, Lord, born, etc.) It tracks very close to Calvin & the creed.

This is a fantastic Douglass speech, reported from Scotland, 1846. Facing the argument that American slaves "were favoured with religious instruction," Douglass performed "a sketch of a sermon which he had often heard preached." (Bottom half of page) glc.yale.edu/free-church-sc… His strategy is to take apart the pro-slaver's appeal to Scripture via "mimic solemnity." It's a risky strategy (reverse minstrelsy + tropes useful to infidels), but he has to force a wedge between the Bible & its mis-use. The stenographer records [laughter] over a dozen times.

My teaching rotation has me spending the next 2 days in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (by Himself!) w/our juniors. (If I'm on Twitter at all during this heavy teaching phase of the week, tweets'll skew in that direction. A rich text!) My notes tell me the the first session I taught on this book in @TorreyHonors was in Feb 2000. Those students are now in their 40s.

Athanasius Contra Gentes 46: Christ is not Wisdom & Word by participating in those things (as creatures do); rather, "he is the very Wisdom, very Word, and very own Power of the Father, very Light, very Truth, very Righteousness, very Virtue," etc. All these "very" constructions are a string of auto-compounds in Greek: autosophia, autologos, autodunamis [idia tou Patros estin], autophos, autoaletheia, autodikaiosune, autoarete. It's like
Latin 'ipse,' and you could translate it "itself." Coolness rating: 100.

Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae mindmap as tree. From Rijksmuseum, 16th c print It's a very ambitious print, y'all! Here's a look at the bottom left:

I recently gave some brief answers to a few questions from a seminary student who was assigned to teach on the Trinity based on the essay printed as chapter 2 in Fountain of Salvation. Here's a threadthreadthread .com of some of the answers. eerdmans.com/Products/7810/… The doctrine of the Trinity is a vast & comprehensive doctrine, so it makes sense to place it very early in any course of Christian instruction. Things like Christology & pneumatology can then drop into their proper places. In education jargon, Trinity is an advance organizer.

I ran across another case of somebody saying, "how can 3 be 1, and 1 be three; who knows, mystery etc." I don't think people do this on purpose, but notice the moves they have to make: reduce the doctrine to math by subtracting the actual nouns involved. The nouns are "being" & "persons," & they're kinda important. But never mind that for now: If you'd like to perform a reduction to math, you should at least be consistent in your translation, & represent different nouns by different algebraic signifiers. It's not 3x = 1x...