Confessing the FaithWhy did Constantine summon the bishops to Nicaea, and how did the church remember the moment afterward? Andrews traces the council through the eyes of Eusebius and Theodoret, the historians who first preserved its witness for the centuries that followed.
Confessing the FaithThe Council of Nicaea was 1,700 years ago, but Small argues its disputes still live in pews and pulpits unrecognized. He examines what the Creed affirms and what it refuses to believe, drawing on Barth and Christopher Morse to recover the necessity of confessing both.
DiscipleshipMiller takes Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi as the question that follows every pastor home: who do you say that I am? A conference address mixing personal story with theological seriousness, reflecting on living and ministering east of Eden, between hell's gates and the keys of the kingdom.
From Mark 2, Burnett walks through Christ's habit of dining with sinners and tax collectors. What does the divine yes to the wrong people require us to refuse? Especially now, in a moment when the church most wants to say yes to everything.
A sermon on Matthew 16, where Peter recognizes Jesus as the Christ. Small preaches against the language of dying churches, hearing in Christ's promise to Peter the foundation that no rate of decline can shake: the gates of hell will not prevail against the church Christ is building.
Why come to Jesus rather than to the certified teachers of the law? Bartow preaches Matthew 11's invitation to take Christ's yoke as the answer to a question Israel had been asking for generations: where, exactly, do we go to find rest for our souls?
TheologyIf we could time-travel to first-century Galilee and look for Jesus, what would we find? Edwards uses the thought experiment to trace the leap from a small itinerant Jewish movement to the church Ignatius wrote to seventy years later, and what survived intact in the transition.
Part two of Edwards's two-part essay on the early church's startling decision to give Jesus the most sacred name for God. This installment takes up the precedent in YHWH's own self-revelation that made the move thinkable for Jewish monotheists.
TheologyThe earliest Greek title for Jesus was 'Lord' (kyrios), the same word the Septuagint used for YHWH. Edwards asks how Jewish monotheists could have applied the divine name to a Galilean rabbi, and what precedent for that move they found in the Old Testament itself.
Ephesians 2 says Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, in the present perfect tense: it was done, and it remains done. Goodloe asks why the church so often acts as if the work were still pending, and what it means to live as those for whom reconciliation is already accomplished.
Wisdom summarizes Burnett's keynote at the 2020 TM conference: confessing Jesus as the truth has always been provocative, always contested, and never confessed for long without a cost. Burnett works the claim through Barmen and into our own moment.
Part two of Burgess's keynote on John 14:6 picks up the human longing for life that is more than survival. He locates the answer not in the desperate self-renewal our culture sells, but in the gift of life that comes to us from outside ourselves through Christ.
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