Christ Church Studies

God is love. Those three little words contain the most profound meaning. Of all the divine attributes, Scripture places the greatest emphasis on love. But what does it mean to say that God is love? How does God’s love compare to our own, and where do we see God’s love revealed? These questions we consider in this final session.

The attribute of holiness sets apart the God of Scripture from all the false gods of other religions. Holiness is everywhere in the Bible. “Holy, holy, holy,” cry the angels. Where God meets his people is holy ground. In this session, we explore what divine holiness is, how we experience it, and why it is good news.

According to John Wooden, faithfulness is one of the most important character traits: to be a person that others “can bet the farm on and still be able to sleep at night.” God exemplifies faithfulness more than any other, and in this lesson, we discuss how we experience God’s faithfulness and how we can become ourselves a faithful people.

When we witness wrongdoing, our hearts cry out for justice. Something must be done! Yet when it comes to ourselves, we desperately hope for mercy. How can both of these longings be fulfilled? We find both justice and mercy in the justice of God.

Does God really know what he’s doing? We believe that God is good and God is powerful, but can we really trust his purposes and his plans? In other words, is God wise? That is the question that we address in this session as we reflect on the wisdom of God. We’ll discuss what it means to call God wise and why this matters so much to our everyday lives.

We sing the almighty power of God. Among God’s attributes is his overwhelming power and might, for God’s voice can bring worlds into existence, make mountains tremble, and raise the dead. The power of God is a consuming fire, never safe but always good.

“You are good and do good.” This verse from Psalm 119 identifies one of God’s central attributes: goodness. God is supremely good. He is the most desirable good, and the generous Giver who shares his goodness with others, even before creation itself.

God doesn’t change. His character doesn’t change. His purposes do not change. His will does not change. And in a world of constant change, when so much that once seemed solid and dependable is no longer so, this is enormously good news. For, to quote an Anglican prayer, “we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life” can find rest in the “eternal changelessness” of God.

While it may sound off-putting, the truth that God doesn’t need us is actually wonderfully heartening. God’s self-sufficiency means He depends on nothing for His existence or happiness, enabling Him to love us in perfect freedom rather than from necessity.

To see and to know God—that, according to Jesus, is the goal of human life. That is what will make us happy. That is how our hearts will find rest. But how can we see a God who is invisible? And how can we know a God whose being is beyond our comprehension? In this session, we begin our study of God’s attributes with a discussion of our complete inability to comprehend him and why this matters. 

This final lesson frames parenting as divine vocation within God’s broader calling on Christian life. When parenting feels overwhelming or passes quickly, remembering it as God’s calling can transform how we practice parenting for our families’ good and God’s glory.

This lesson addresses parenting’s significant modern challenge: relating wisely to technology. Digital technology has dramatically changed parenting and childhood in recent decades. Parents must initially shepherd children’s technology relationship, then gradually help them learn to make wise digital decisions independently.

This third lesson reframes discipline beyond simple behavior modification as apprenticing children to gather their energies together toward love’s purposes. Dr. Coolman invites parents to view discipline as apprenticeship into essential skills needed for virtuous living rather than behavioral control.

Dr. Coolman introduces apprenticeship as a transformative framework for reimagining Christian parenting, moving beyond management-style approaches that emerged from recent technological and economic changes in domestic life. This apprenticeship model reframes the parent-child relationship as disciple-making disciples of Jesus Christ.

In this first session, Dr. Holly Taylor Coolman provides an overview of the Christian vocation of parenting. Throughout church history, the family has been viewed as a miniature church, a worshipping community whose shared life is fundamentally guided by love.

We often speak of hope as a kind of wishful thinking or general optimism, such as hope that a relationship will work out or that an interview will go well. But this is not what the Bible speaks of as the virtue of hope. Christian hope is confidence in God and God’s promises. In this session, we discuss how Christian hope gives us strength to live in the present.

Love is central and necessary to a life well lived. Act justly, prudently, temperately, and courageously, but without love, you can never be the person God made you to be. In this lesson, we discuss why love is so essential, why we need the grace of God to become loving, and how we can open ourselves up to God’s transforming work.

Prudence, justice, temperance, and courage are recognized as central virtues by many religious and philosophical traditions. But faith, hope, and love–these three are uniquely Christian. In this session we begin with faith: what is it, and how is it a virtue?

Fear is among the most common obstacles that prevent us from doing what we should. And its remedy is often courage, the fourth and final of the cardinal virtues. In this session, we discuss why courage is so important and how we grow in it.

In the book of Philippians, the apostle Paul serves us a warning about lacking temperance: “Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame.” In this session, we discuss the peril Paul is referencing and how the virtue of temperance helps us to avoid it.

What do we owe to God and what do we owe to one another? That is the basic question of justice, a question the God of the Bible takes very seriously. In this session, we consider what it means to be just and how to respond when we fail to do what is right.

How do we make wise decisions and carry them through? How do we judge rightly what is right and what is wrong? How do we set goals worthy of our lives and then achieve them? Questions like these reveal our need for the virtue of prudence, the first virtue in our exploration of Christian character.

“All things come to us, not by chance, but by God’s fatherly hand.” This doctrine, described as such in the Heidelberg Catechism, is a truth wonderfully reflected in the book of Ruth. As we conclude this study, we discover that behind the twists and turns of Ruth’s story lie the invisible hand of God.

On the threshing floor that night, Boaz asks Ruth, “Who are you?” Is she a woman who should be ashamed or a woman of honor? It is a weighty question with much at stake, and it is asked not only of Ruth, but of ourselves. Who is Ruth, and who are we?

The romance of Ruth and Boaz is among the most famous in the Bible. Yet when they first met, they were not romantic interests but two people from entirely different worlds: a wealthy, respected landowner meets a poor, immigrant widow. Through their unlikely relationship, we glimpse our own relationship with God.