For two thousand years theologians have used the words “faith, hope, and love” to summarize the Christian message. It all began with Paul who said in Colossians 1: 4-6 that the triad is the “Gospel” and the “Word of Truth”. Although most theologians claim the three are essential for a healthy life and for correcting […]
Last week I tried to make the case for faith, hope, and love being a very careful choice for summarizing the Christian life. I’d like to take a few weeks to examine the features that make the triad so important. First, the three proclaim how Christians handle the very basic human activity of relating the […]
Bob has entered the discussion again with his usual critical thought, forcing me to clarify my ideas. He wrote, “I think there is a strong argument that faith, hope, and love endure as constant beacons for the Christian life. Yet for many of us these illuminating beacons do not reveal universal, unchanging answers to the […]
Bob wrote, “How rarely we start with the admonition ‘in all we do and say about this let us always keep the beacons of faith, hope, and love before us to guide us.’ We seem rather to be driven primarily by our prior experiences, predilections, and prejudices to which, in the end, we may give […]
Biblical faith is best defined as trust. To have faith does not mean simply believing God exists or accepting some teaching about him. It is to trust God’s promises. So when Jesus wonders out loud in Luke 18: 8, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, he could be asking […]
I closed last week’s post with the question, “What does faith in God involve? What do we trust God to do for us?” None of the responses I received believed faith in God involved expecting God to grant personal requests. For example, Bob wrote, “I think that trust in others is a surrogate for trust […]
Let me say more about story and promise. It can be said that the Bible contains God’s story. We are not talking about theological statements, laws or even history. As the Augsburg Confession XX says, faith is not merely knowledge of historical events, even Satan knows these, but a confidence in God and the fulfillment […]
Let me list the points our discussion has made so far: Faith is trusting God. It includes trusting also the goodness of his creation. That means we must trust God’s love in spite of what we observe humans doing to one another and what we remember they did to Jesus. To trust God is to […]
At the heart of Christianity is, of course, faith in Christ Jesus. John says this means Jesus is the logos, the design, or the explanation of the world. If Jesus is the first thing God created, he becomes the pattern by which everything else is made. He is the key to understanding everything else in […]
Let’s take a look at “hope” as we continue our study of the triad used to describe the Christian life. For what do we hope? A quick word search finds the object of Christian hope is usually our own resurrections or our sharing in the glory of God, two ways of saying the same thing. […]
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