DEERFIELD, IL — Professor Joshua Jipp is the new Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding. For nearly twenty years, the Henry Center has sought to bridge the gap between the academy and the church by cultivating resources and communities that advance Christian wisdom. Jipp is the center’s fourth Director, following…

Deerfield, IL — The 2021–22 recipients of the John Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement are Mike Strand, Jamie Thompson, Ben Wayman, Bob Munshaw, Nic Gibson, Chris Ganski, and Daniel Houck. This year, the Creation Project is focusing on the Christian doctrine of humanity, and these churches will be engaging the topic in ways that attend…

We are pleased to announce the Henry Center Public Events for this academic year. The following six lectures are free and open to the public; registration is required. Join us, in person or online, for the opportunity to listen to leading theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers, as they explore human personhood in theological and scientific…

Tempted: I see that I must be placed in the ground and reduced to dust. A bed will be spread out for my body in the grave and therefore I said to that place of rottenness, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worms, ‘You are my mother and sister’ (Job 17:14). Comforter: Do not…

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion . . . ” Thus, every reader of the Christian Scriptures is presented with this design and purpose framework to understand humanity. The Genesis account includes both the uniqueness—from other created things—and the commonality—in form and function—of all humans. Christian…

  Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. … Every place had been displaced,…

“We are our attention.” So says Daniel Siegal, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. This “stunning claim,” as she calls it, has captured Christina Bieber Lake’s attention. “We are in a unique time when it comes to things clamoring for our attention,” says Lake,…

Deerfield, IL — The Henry Center for Theological Understanding is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021–2022 Henry Resident Fellowship. This year’s recipients are: Christina Bieber Lake, Gijsbert van den Brink, James Arcadi, Philip Woodward, and Jon Thompson. The Resident Fellowship program is the centerpiece of the Henry Center’s Creation Project, a multi-million dollar…

In an age when the weight of science is held in the balance and the natural order is often held in conflict with biblical belief, the church needs both a robust doctrine of creation and the tools necessary to navigate toward sympathetic conversations. This is the goal of the Henry Center’s Stott Award for Pastoral…

Deerfield, IL — The 2020–21 recipients of the John Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement are Steve Froehlich, Thiago Guerra, Daniel Houck, Matt O’Reilly, Joey Sherrard, and Brad Swope. This year, the Creation Project is focusing upon the goodness of creation, and these churches will be engaging the topic in ways that attend to the intersection…

We are pleased to announce the Henry Center Public Lectures and Events for this academic year. The following six lectures are free and open to the public, and will be hosted exclusively online. Registration is required. Each lecture will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the other speakers from this year’s events. Join us…

Beginning this academic year, Geoffrey Fulkerson will be the Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding. Geoffrey H. Fulkerson Fulkerson is the center’s third Director, following the leadership of Douglas Sweeney, and most recently, Thomas McCall. “These are big steps to follow in,” Fulkerson commented. “Doug and Tom are exemplary scholars,…

A great and godly servant has gone to glory. James Inell Packer knew how to serve his risen Lord through both the spoken and written word, and also through sage advice shared with others. He taught in theological colleges in both Britain and Canada. This British born, Oxford D.Phil. was a church scholar rather than…

I first met Bruce Fields in 1988 when I relocated from Southern CA to Arlington Heights, IL to become Sr. Pastor of the Orchard Evangelical Free Church. Bruce had just moved from teaching and coaching at Trinity College to teaching theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Within a few moments of meeting, we quickly became…

Keith Yandell is gone. After a long battle with multiple health problems, on the morning of April 28, 2020 he drew his last breath. He is now “absent from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8). Keith was the Julius R. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where…

“We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it,” Wendell Berry exhorted us 50 years ago. “We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.”From his essay, “A…

Our relationship to pleasure has been tormented since the serpent appeared in Eden, right after the repeated affirmation of the goodness of creation. How are we to look at trees that are good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desired to make one wise? Such trees lie in the midst of paradise, always…

“God saw that it was good.” As reported by Saint Augustine, the Manichees latched onto the peculiarity of this refrain in the opening chapter of Genesis to criticize the received Christian doctrine of creation. Read in a certain light, it seems to suggest that either God didn’t know what he was going to make before…

“The divorce of the natural and moral universes is perhaps the worst legacy of the Enlightenment, and the most urgent challenge facing modern humankind.” So said British theologian Colin Gunton 35 years ago.Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Toward a Trinitarian Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985), 25. One might reasonably claim…

Deerfield, IL — The Henry Center for Theological Understanding is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2020–2021 Henry Resident Fellowship. This year’s recipients are Joshua Jipp, Kevin Kinghorn, Max Lee, and Alexander Stewart. The Resident Fellowship program is the centerpiece of the Henry Center’s Creation Project, a multi-million dollar grant funded by the John…

We are pleased to announce the Henry Center Public Lectures and Events for the 2019–20 academic year. All Trinity events are free and open to the public, and will also be made available via live stream. God said . . . and it was so: Divine Action, Contingency, and Modern Science The whole of the…

Deerfield, IL — The 2019–2020 recipients of the John Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement are Gavin Ortlund, Wesley Vander Lugt, Ryan O’Dowd, Mike Woodruff, Ben Dockery, Matt O’Reilly, Greg Gilbert, and Rafael Bello. This year, the Creation Project is focusing upon the topic of divine action, and these churches will be engaging the topic in ways…

In the summer of 1955, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a letter to W. H. Auden telling of his surprise while working on The Lord of the Rings: “I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me.” The letter is available online. This feeling, that the characters in a novel can come…

Remarking on the natural human propensities toward both pride and ease, Francis Bacon observed “A man will become attached to one particular science and field of investigation either because he thinks he was its author and inventor or because he has worked hard on it and become habituated to it.” This strikes most of us…

The rise of the Carolingian Empire (ca. 800–888 AD) witnessed an abundance of theological and philosophical inquiry and controversy, not least because the relative political stability made connections across geographical regions easier, along with a widespread effort by its authorities to promote educational and religious reforms and thus to develop greater uniformity in Christian thought…

God acts in the world. Christians believe that the world is not some mechanical device that God wound up at creation and has since left unattended. God upholds and sustains the world in being, and absent his sustaining activity the world would simply cease to exist. While these beliefs are vital to the Christian faith,…

“As God’s authoritative word, Scripture is normative for all of life, including science.” So says Craig Bartholomew, a member of the 2019–2020 Henry Resident Fellowship community. In today’s climate, these are fighting words—resulting in more heat than light. When we hear this sentiment from Bartholomew, however, it means something quite different. First, and most basically,…

Deerfield, IL — The 2019–2020 recipients of the Henry Resident Fellowship are Craig Bartholomew, Craig Keener, Brian Matz, Paul Gould, and Jordan Wessling. The Resident Fellowship program is the centerpiece of the Henry Center’s Creation Project, a multi-million dollar grant funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The Fellowship is a scholar-in-residence program designed to support…