Historical Theology

Question 1118 When we turn from Malachi to Matthew, we cross a gap of some 400 years without a single word of inspired Scripture. After Malachi's final prophecy, no prophet ...

Question 10115 Purgatory is the Roman Catholic doctrine that believers who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins or unpaid temporal punishment must undergo purification before ...

Question 12045 Baptists hold a remarkable and often underappreciated distinction in the history of Western civilisation: they were among the earliest voices in the English-speaking world to call for universal ...

Question 7069 The question of salvation divided Western Christianity in the sixteenth century and has not been formally resolved since. The Protestant Reformation turned fundamentally on the question of how ...

Question 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely ...

Question 13013 The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a theological invention but a recovery. When Luther posted his theses and Calvin worked through Geneva, what drove them ...

Question 2077 The account of Uzzah's death in 2 Samuel 6 is one of those passages that stops readers short. A man reaches out to stop the ark from falling, ...

Question 13012 The episode in Genesis 9 following the flood is brief, strange, and deeply uncomfortable. Noah becomes drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, his son Ham "sees the nakedness ...

Question 13011 Gnosticism was not a single, tidy system but a collection of interconnected religious ideas that shared enough common assumptions to pose a recognisable and serious threat to the ...

Question 1014 Whether God revealed Himself and His purposes all at once or incrementally across time is not a minor academic question. It shapes how we read the whole Bible, ...

Question 1019 Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what the discipline ...

Question 01167 One of the most instructive parallels in the history of biblical translation is the parallel between the authority claimed for the Latin Vulgate by the mediaeval and Counter-Reformation ...

Question 01168 The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus are two of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Christian Bible in existence. Both date from the fourth century ...

Question 01169 The New Testament has been transmitted in over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, along with thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. This remarkable abundance ...

Question 0010 Before we can answer why, we should be clear about what we mean by a catechism. The word comes from the Greek κατηχέω (katēcheō), meaning "to teach by ...

Question 13002 Today, October 31st, marks Reformation Day. So who was Martin Luther? Luther was a German monk, tormented by his sin, desperately trying to earn salvation through religious practices ...