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How Is God Beautiful? An Answer from Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards emphasizes an aspect of God’s nature that most systematic theologies barely mention: the beauty of God. But what exactly does it mean that God is beautiful? This is a question that Edwards explores in his work The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards realized that there was a kind of beauty in virtue, yet a beauty of…
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Christians and Transcendental Meditation
Last Wednesday Katy Perry, Sting, and Jerry Seinfeld got together for a little shindig in Carnegie Hall. The point of the event? As the New York Times put it, “To raise money for the David Lynch Foundation, which the film director has devoted to spreading the word on [Transcendental Meditation],” often abbreviated as T.M. According to…
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What Is the Future of Libraries?
I used two libraries in the same day. One was a seminary library. When I arrived, the door was locked and the lights were off. I meandered down a hallway and found someone in an office who sheepishly let me in and turned on the lights. The lights illumined the rows and rows of books.…
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The Pastor as Public Theologian
My first encounter with Kevin Vanhoozer came when I read his article “Theology and Apologetics” in the New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics. I found myself deeply stirred by his statement that “we need a biblically informed shape of community life fully to see, and to taste, the wisdom of God in a consistent and compelling manner.” He closes his…
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The God of Ecclesiastes
It is deeply ingrained in our intuition that there is some kind of deity out there—a higher power that is responsible for much of what we see and experience. Recently, a study at the University of Oxford concluded that “human thought processes were ‘rooted’ to religious concepts.” (This study came with a price tag of £1.9 million…
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What We Can Learn from “Vanity” in Ecclesiastes
When interpreting this “vanity of vanities” mantra, it is important to keep in mind both the scope of “vanity” (everything “under the sun”) as well as the final point of the whole book: “fear God and keep his commandments.” By relentlessly emphasizing that nothing in life will yield certain meaning or ultimate satisfaction (“all is vanity”),…
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Does God Hate the Sin but Love the Sinner?
D. A. Carson’s article on “love” in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology contains this helpful discussion about the statement “God hates sin but loves sinners.” There is a small element of truth in this thesis. God always hates sin; he is invariably and implacably opposed to it. And it is true that God loves sinners: God ‘demonstrates his…
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Five Apps I Love and Use a Lot
It recently hit me that there are certain apps that have become part of my daily routine or that I often depend on. Here’s a list of the apps I currently love and use a lot. Hoopla I use this library service app nearly every day. You can connect it with your local library, and…
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God’s Omnibenevolence and the Problem of Evil
The doctrine of God’s omnibenevolence (God’s complete goodness) raises the problem of evil. The classic formulation of this problem is the apparent incompatibility of the three propositions: 1) God is wholly good, 2) God is all-powerful, and 3) evil exists. If God is wholly good, he would want to prevent gratuitous evil; and if he were…
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Can God Make a Stone So Heavy He Can’t Lift It?
Some questions aren’t worth answering. Not because the question is too hard to think through, but because if you try to answer it, you have just stepped into a world of nonsense and absurdity. For example, anyone who seriously tried to discuss the question, “How did George Washington like driving with a manual transmission?” is only…
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