Michael J. Svigel

@svigel.bsky.social

Theology professor, department chair, patristic scholar, writer, husband, father. Passionate about the one Lord and his church.

Theology 101: If you don’t feel “fed” at church, it could be that your pulpit is serving up tasteless morsels of low-cal cliches. But it could also be that you’re a picky eater who’s been spoiled with junk food and lost a taste for real spiritual meat.

Theology 101: The Son is eternally Son of the eternal Father; the Father is eternally Father of the eternal Son. The Son never “became” Son, and the Father never “became” Father. This is eternal generation. There is a historic alternative to this: Arianism.

Theology 101: Beware of cases when ministry leaders cast their own existential fight to maintain their power and prestige as an existential fight to save the church or the gospel. (Hint: the church and gospel don’t need crooked, conniving, and conceited leaders to protect it.)

Theology 101 ESSAY QUESTION: What secular film do you believe has the most implicit Christian message, however you want to define that (redemption, atonement, forgiveness, etc.)? Explain the reason for your choice:

Theology 101: A catalogue of basic holy virtues to live, godly values to embrace, and worldly vices to avoid should be included in our churches’ articles of faith, confessions, or doctrinal statements—along with what we believe about God, humanity, sin, salvation, and so forth.

Theology 101: I could never muster enough skepticism to believe that a world with the coffee bean, the cocoa bean, and the vanilla bean could have come about by anything other than a good, wise, and powerful being worthy of my worship and obedience.

Theology 101: Churches have almost totally failed to teach their people how to think carefully and critically about sources, authorities, and discernment of logical and rhetorical fallacies. In this way, they have failed to love the Lord their God with their whole their minds.

Theology 101: Trashing the theological tradition of a brother in Christ on social media isn’t like making fun of a man’s haircut or wardrobe. It’s like making fun of his family. In public. It’s nasty, and it tells me all I need to know about your own smallness and bad nature.

Theology 301: Though it’s speculative fiction, the scenario portrayed in “The AItheist 2.0” explains and illustrates my position on too much reliance upon A.I. It exposes a dimension of the discussion from a Christian perspective almost NOONE is considering…

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Theology 101: Theology 101: Though Jesus’s message had acute social and political implications, Jesus was not a politician. He was not on the right, not on the left, and not in the middle. His kingdom was not of this world.

I have lived on both ends of I-35—Minnesota and Texas. And I have to believe somewhere between here and there is the perfect balance of seasons, wet and dry, hot and cold, rain, sun, and snow. Maps and math tell me that’s in Iowa, but I’m just not convinced.

The dramatic rise in antisemitism, anti-Judaism, and anti-Israel hatred defies natural explanation. It’s literally diabolical, and many are falling under its spell. You can disagree with a religion’s tenets and with a nation’s policies and practices without spewing devilish hate.

Theology 101: THESIS—From a theological perspective, nuclear power is the energy of redemption. It exemplifies humanity’s exercise of dominion by harnessing the destructive force of degeneration and transforming it into heat and light, taking what is bad and using it for good.

Tonight during dinner: My wife, Steph: “Does New Jersey have hummingbirds?” Me: “Of course. Even Minnesota has hummingbirds.” Steph: “We don’t have hummingbirds in Germany.” Me: “That’s because Germany drove out the hummingbirds with all their nonsense.” Steph: 😕

Theology 101: The Holy Spirit indwells both individual believers and the corporate body of Christ made up of those believers (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19; 12:13). The Holy Spirit doesn’t indwell a 501(c)(3), an academic institution, a parachurch organization, or a denominational convention.

Theology 101: In the first two centuries, the church grew from a single room in Jerusalem to countless congregations in Africa, Europe, and Asia without government support or acts of violence, but by teaching truth and loving well. That’s the Christianity I want to retrieve.

Theology 101: Original “catholicity” was not institutional or hierarchical unity among all churches, but dogmatic and confessional unity around the trinitarian creation-fall-redemption narrative centered on the person and work of Christ, as articulated in common baptismal confessions.