bible and theology on Theological Division

I read in a book recently about a young pastor who was fired from his church over a theological controversy. When he went to share the news with his wife, he said, “I’ve got good news and bad news, wh...

It has been my earnest endeavor ever since I have preached the Word, never to keep back a single doctrine that I believe to be taught of God. It is time that we had done with the old and rusty systems...

The farmers in the old prairie days used to prepare for a winter storm by putting up a rope between the house and the barn. They did this because they knew that in a swirling blizzard, even a brief di...

From 1992 to 1995 the world witnessed one of the worst civil conflicts, the Bosnian War. Three factions, each tied to a religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), began attacking...

"Just Believe..." “It doesn’t matter what you believe, just as long as you believe something.” That’s the sentiment once expressed by President Dwight Eisenhower. America would be stro...

Let's Explore Ephesians! This summer, we’re inviting you—and your congregation—to join us in a journey through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. As your congregation's minds turn toward rest,...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. Th...

How Will We Preach and Teach from Proverbs? Reading, let alone preaching, from The Book of Proverbs comes with its challenges. Sometimes those sayings can seem just plain obvious and not much help ...

Theology is practical, especially now... If you do not listen to Theology that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-dat...

A theology which asserts that only the organized Church should be involved in mission, that theology has a very serious quarrel with history.

O God, who through your Son has taught us that a house divided against itself must fall: Save us, we beg you, from the danger of a divided allegiance; unite our hearts to fear your name; and grant tha...

O God, whose will it is that all your children should be one in Christ; we pray for the unity of your Church. Pardon all our pride and our lack of faith, of understanding and of charity, which are the...

O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior, the Prince of Peace: Give us grace to take to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice...

There is no mere world or matters of fact for covenant theology; there is always the wonder and duty to the concrete moment at hand, where God’s illimitable gift of life is given into our hands – to h...

Gracious God, you have called us to be a unified body, working together that which you have willed for the world. In our apathy, we fail to participate in the work you have called us to do. In our div...

Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly in...

It is just as much a matter of discipline for a church member practically to deny his stewardship as to deny the divinity of Christ.

A theology of response does not need to be Pelagian; it need only be a theology in which the reality of the human is taken seriously.

Karl Barth arguably was the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. His twelve-volume Church Dogmatics, alone, consists of over ten thousand pages of systematic theology. Toward the end of his l...

Did you know that apartheid in South Africa was based in large part on theological doctrines that were formed at Stellenbosch University in the 1930s and 1940s? Isn’t that chilling? Many of the intell...

Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga.

God, you created us in your image. You are three in one. From before time began, you existed in perfect communion. Yet day by day, we choose not to live into your image. We choose division, pointing o...

Creator God, you created us in your image. You are three in one. From before time began, you existed in perfect communion. Yet day by day, we choose not to live into your image. We choose division, po...

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.

Ultimately we are not concerned only with the unity of the church. Christ is the unity of the world. Not only the middle wall of partition separating Jew and Gentile must be moved if Christ is to real...

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us…. Where we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the questions… we might predict with certainty the s...

It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

I was walking in San Francisco along the Golden Gate Bridge when I saw a man about to jump off. I tried to dissuade him from committing suicide and told him simply that God loved him. A tear came to h...

I spend half my time telling Christians to study doctrine and the other half telling them doctrine is not enough.