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Augustine & The Problem of the Christian Master with Dr. Matthew Elia (Podcast)
Read more: Augustine & The Problem of the Christian Master with Dr. Matthew Elia (Podcast)In this episode we’re joined by Dr. Matthew Elia, who is assistant professor of theology, race, and environment at Saint Louis University, and the author of The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (published by Yale University Press). Over the course of our conversation we talk about what Augustine had…
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Gender as Love with Dr. Fellipe do Vale (Podcast)
Read more: Gender as Love with Dr. Fellipe do Vale (Podcast)In this episode we are joined by Dr. Fellipe do Vale, who is Department Chair & Assistant Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and he’s the author of Gender as Love: A Theological Account of Human Identity, Embodied Desire, and Our Social Worlds (published by Baker Academic)….
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Augustine, Original Sin, and a Lesson on Friendship
Read more: Augustine, Original Sin, and a Lesson on FriendshipI love thinking about friendship. Even more, I love having friends. In my most recent reading of Augustine’s Confessions, I couldn’t help but notice the respectable bishop seemed to share some of my feelings of longing and affection when it comes to possessing and enjoying the good of friendship. Though Augustine never wrote a treatise…
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Using Context for Compassion
Read more: Using Context for CompassionI recently had the opportunity to finish up a Trinity course for my ThM studies. Despite the mysteriousness of the topic, it was quite phenomenal to be reading and comparing the thoughts of our early church fathers to more recent theologians. While we didn’t get the opportunity to tackle whole texts like Augustine’s, De Trinitate,…
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Augustine’s Trinity, Perelandra’s Vanity, and the Spirit of Unity
Read more: Augustine’s Trinity, Perelandra’s Vanity, and the Spirit of Unity“Probably not pastoral.” I scribbled this note in the margins of Book IX of Augustine’s On the Trinity. He was in the middle of some obscure-sounding argument that the Trinity makes sense of the biblical idea that “God is love.” Because the act of love, “involves three things… a person who loves, that which is loved,…
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Objections to the Trinity
Read more: Objections to the TrinityHere in Sydney I’m currently co-teaching a seminary class on the doctrine of the Trinity. We’ve spent the first few weeks of the course reading and discussing some sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. The next section will focus on parts of Augustine’s De Trinitate. In the final third of the semester we’ll work through §59 of Karl…
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Amillennialism, Two Kingdoms and The Decay of History (Part 1)
Read more: Amillennialism, Two Kingdoms and The Decay of History (Part 1)A few weeks back, my fellow blogger, John Dunne, posted an article in which he critiqued his Amillenial[1] beliefs. I too am an Amillenialist and became one around the same time as John. I think we both read the same book (A Case for Amillenialism by Kim Riddlebarger) within a few months of each other….
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Amillennialism: Rethinking and Critiquing My Eschatology After Five Years
Read more: Amillennialism: Rethinking and Critiquing My Eschatology After Five YearsBack in May 2007 I posted a little blurb on my silly little blog (Dunne’s Discourses) about how I had become an Amillennialist. The main person responsible for my conversion was Pastor Kim Riddlebarger of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, CA. His book A Case for Amillennialism is one of the best at defending the position from…
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Hermeneutics of Love (Guest Post)
Read more: Hermeneutics of Love (Guest Post)Withstanding the apostles and Jesus himself, Saint Aurelius Augustine is arguably the greatest Christian theologian of the first millennium. His contributions to the understanding and development of Bible interpretation are incalculable. He was a man ahead of his time. Indeed many of the current debates on hermeneutics and postmodern literary criticism appeal to Augustine for…
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Prayer as Ethics
Read more: Prayer as Ethics“…you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought…” -St. Augustine “Ethics” means more than understanding how one should act in a certain situation in order to be free from blame. This type of ethics is…