Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4074 When theologians speak of the “eternal counsels of the Godhead,” they mean the purposes, plans, and decisions that exist within God’s own being before any act of creation — the eternal agreement between Father, Son, and Spirit regarding what they would do and how they would do it. The language of “counsel” risks…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4072 One of the most remarkable statements in Paul’s letters about the Holy Spirit appears almost in passing in the middle of his argument about the Spirit’s role in revealing God’s wisdom. In 1 Corinthians 2:10, Paul writes: “for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” The phrase “the depths of God”…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4069 The Holy Spirit did not arrive at Pentecost as though He had been absent from the universe until that point. He is the eternal third Person of the Trinity, and His activity runs through the Old Testament from the opening verses of Genesis to the closing pages of Malachi. What changed at Pentecost…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4070 Pneumatology — the doctrine of the Holy Spirit — cannot be properly understood in isolation from Trinitarian theology, and the reverse is equally true. The two disciplines are so closely intertwined that to study one without the other is to distort both. The Spirit is not an appendix to Christian theology or a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04032 The Holy Spirit’s involvement in creation is stated in the opening lines of the Bible and yet is often overlooked. When we think of creation, we tend to think of the Father’s decree and the Son’s agency, and rightly so. But the Spirit was there at the very beginning, active and purposeful before…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3065 This is an excellent question, and it gets to the heart of who Jesus really is. If Jesus is God, why would He need to pray? Was He talking to Himself? The answer lies in understanding the doctrine of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation. Far from being a problem for…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02059 The question of whether the persons of the Trinity share one consciousness or possess three distinct consciousnesses takes us to the very frontier of what can be known about God — and, it turns out, to the frontier of what the word “consciousness” is even equipped to mean when applied to a divine…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02051 Divine simplicity is the classical theological claim that God is not composed of parts — that His attributes are not separate components assembled together to make up what He is, but are identical with His very essence. It is a doctrine with deep roots in the Christian theological tradition, and it deserves a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2071 “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). These words, spoken by Jesus on the night of his arrest, have been among the most contested in Christian theology. Arians used them to argue that Jesus is a lesser being than the Father. Others have suggested they refer only to Jesus’ incarnate condition and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04016 When Christians think about prayer, the question of who exactly we are addressing is more significant than it might first appear. Most believers instinctively pray to “God” or “Father” without pausing to consider the Trinitarian dimensions of what they are doing. But when someone asks whether it is appropriate to direct prayer specifically…