The contemplative home of Skylar D. McManus
I've been a thinking a lot recently about Jesus' statement to the Jewish leaders in John 5:37 that, "You people have never heard his voice nor seen his form at any time." This text, among others in the Gospel of John, helps to explain Christological interpretations of the Old Testament. It also seems like this… Continue reading Jesus on Whether Anyone Has Heard God’s Voice
It is common for Trinitarian scholars to point to John 1:1b ("and the Word was with God") as evidence that the Word is (1) a personal subject and (2) is a distinct personal subject from the Father who was there "in the beginning." Since I'd like to be brief, I won't reproduce the quotations from… Continue reading A Syntactical Analysis of John 1:1b
In a previous post I discussed how some early patristic authors read the Old Testament and found the pre-existing Word of God who is personally distinct from the Father. As I claimed, what they say follows straightforwardly from the "Johannine Paradigm" which comes from the following verses:John 1:3 All things were created by him [i.e.,… Continue reading Jesus on Whether Anyone Has Seen God’s “Form”
Near the end of 2019, Oneness PhD candidate (if I recall correctly) and apologist G. Jorge Medina posted an 18-hour course on the Oneness of God on Vimeo. At that time, I asked if he would be willing to grant me access to the course (it costs $150) for review and response. I noted that… Continue reading An Invitation and Response to Oneness Apologist G. Jorge Medina
Doing any serious argumentation and scholarly work requires addressing the best arguments from the best scholars. What this requires of anybody working on Oneness Pentecostalism is to look at what Dr. David K. Bernard has written. In this post (read: small book chapter) I'm going to give a very condensed summary of chapters 1 and… Continue reading Oneness Pentecostals on Revelation 3:21 (Part 2): David Bernard
Recently my master's thesis was posted on ProQuest open access. I provided the abstract for it in a prior post. I'm going to a take a couple of posts to respond to some Oneness attempts to explain the verse, but before that I need to clarify a couple of things about what I was doing… Continue reading Oneness Pentecostals on Revelation 3:21 (Part 1): Some Preliminaries
In the last several decades there have been few sustained works on Oneness Pentecostal Christology. I have added my voice to this small body of literature, and I am the only one I know of that has addressed Oneness Christology from the perspective of analytic theology. My focus is on a single verse and what… Continue reading Now Available: My Master’s Thesis
Reading the surviving writings of the earliest Christian authors can be challenging, rewarding, and perhaps above all frustrating. What I have found, more quickly than anything else, is just how differently these writers' perspectives and overall patterns of thinking differ from my own. As John Behr frequently puts it in his talks, we have to… Continue reading Making Sense of Patristic Christological Readings of the Old Testament
