Essays

Introducing George MacDonald's UnSpoken Sermons

If you are like me, you have spent an embarrassing amount of your time and energy playing checkers. I do not mean the board game. I mean trying to get ourselves crowned, recognized, accepted and honored. And yet sometimes, on our own checker boards, we glimpse movement of another kind, something extraordinary... Read more.

Bearing our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love

The apostolic witness to the world is that the Father’s Son himself has come. The one who is face to face with the Father from all eternity, the one who dwells in the Father’s bosom,1 has come across all worlds to meet us and to relate to us in our brokenness. The eternal Word of God became flesh, as John said, to tabernacle, to dwell with us.2 Accepting the apostolic witness at face value, could anything be more astonishing than such humble stooping by the Father’s eternal Son? What could be more amazing than the Creator of the universe, the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained,3 entering into his own creation and becoming human to be with us?

A Note on Jesus Christ and the Church

To speak the name of Jesus Christ, biblically and in the tradition of the early church is to say Trinity, and it is to say humanity, and it is to say cosmos, and it is to say that the Triune God, the human race and the cosmos are not separated, but bound together in relationship, in union, in covenant forever...

The Gospel of St. John 1:1-18

The Gospel of St. John 1:1-18. Paraphrase by C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D.

Before the time of the beginning, the Word was face to face with God. He was there before the ages in intimate union with God, and fully God...

The Genius of The Shack

A few years back the marketing team for the movie The Shack asked me to write a short piece about the book that could be used to promote the movie. I wrote a three page essay entitled, "The Genius of The Shack" and emailed it to the marketing group, and forgot about it...