Apologetics

Question 60202. Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used ...

Question 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, ...

Question 01152. When the four Gospels were actually written matters more than it might first appear, because a late date, decades after the events described, would leave room for legend ...

Question 1144. Isaiah authorship became a battleground topic the moment nineteenth century scholars noticed that chapters 40 through 66 read differently in tone, vocabulary, and historical setting from chapters 1 ...

Question 1143. Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is one of those questions that sounds academic until you realise how much rests on it. If Moses ...

Question 1158. Petrine authorship of Second Peter has taken more scholarly fire than almost any other claim in the New Testament, and I think the letter deserves better than the ...

Question 01155. Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters bearing Paul's name in the New Testament has been challenged by critical scholarship for well over a century, with roughly half of ...

Question 1174. The Bodmer papyri are, alongside the Chester Beatty collection, among the most significant early witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament, and together these two ...

Question 1171. The Chester Beatty papyri are among the earliest and most significant witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, and I ...

Question 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ ...

Question 1184. What is the book of Enoch, and is it Scripture? This question comes up more often than you might expect, usually prompted by the fact that Jude actually ...

Question 1145. The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship ...

Question 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the "hidden" or "suppressed" gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is ...

Question 60086. Lot's daughters are the subject of one of the ugliest sentences in the Bible. The men of Sodom have surrounded the house demanding that Lot hand over his ...

Question 11078 Speaking to this mountain has become one of the standard phrases of a certain kind of Christian teaching, usually meaning that a believer may address a problem out ...

Question 60113. Spiritual not religious has become the standard British answer to a question about faith, and you will hear it at work, at the school gate and at funerals ...

Question 60111. Chronic illness is a different kind of suffering from the sudden crisis, and the church is often better at the crisis. When somebody collapses there are meals, visits ...

Question 60112. Those who suffer are usually surrounded, at least at first, by people who want to help and have no idea how. I have watched kind Christians make a ...

Question 60017. The question of whether the Qur'an proves the Bible reaches me from two directions at once, and the people asking it want opposite things. Some Muslims say that ...

Question 60110. Prayers for healing are among the most heartfelt any of us ever pray, and one of the hardest things in pastoral ministry is standing beside someone whose prayer ...

Question 60013. Hinduism and Christianity are often placed side by side as two religions, and the comparison misleads before it begins. Hinduism is not a single religion with a founder, ...

Question 60016. Whenever this question comes up, people are usually asking two different things at once, and it helps to separate them before deciding whether Christians and Muslims worship the ...

Question 60011. Christians often assume that modern Judaism is simply the religion of the Old Testament carried forward, and that a Jewish neighbour today believes roughly what Moses believed with ...

Question 60012. Islam and Christianity share a great deal of vocabulary and disagree about almost everything that vocabulary refers to. Both speak of one God, of prophets, of revelation, of ...

Question 60037. Moral relativism arrived with a promise of peace. If there is no truth binding on everyone, the argument went, then nobody can impose anything on anybody, and we ...

Question 60028. Christian political involvement makes many believers uneasy, and the unease usually runs in one of two directions. Some feel that any engagement with public life is a distraction ...

Question 60036. Expressive individualism is the water our culture swims in, and like all water it is hardest to notice when you are soaked in it. It is the conviction ...

Question 60032. Artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into daily life at a speed that has caught most institutions unprepared, the church very much included. Systems ...

Question 60033. Whether a Christian should be using AI is now a live question in ordinary church life rather than a theoretical one. Students are using it for essays, employers ...

Question 60060. Whether extraterrestrial life exists is one of those questions people expect a minister to duck. I am not going to duck it, but I am going to disappoint ...

Question 60031. Creation care is one of those subjects where Christians tend to react rather than think, and the reactions come in two flavours. Some believers absorb the environmental movement ...

Question 60058. The question of animal death sounds like a gardening problem and turns out to be a theology problem. Somebody points out that a woodland floor lives off what ...

Question 60059. The first thing God makes in Genesis is created light, and He makes it on day one, which is three whole days before He hangs the sun in ...

Question 60056. Whether the sun stood still over Gibeon is one of those questions that separates a reader from the text before he has begun. Joshua 10 records that Joshua ...

Question 60057. Are the mountains of Ararat the same today as they were in ancient times? The question comes up whenever somebody proposes an expedition to find the ark, and ...

Question 60038. Religious trauma is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather and is now common enough to have its own shelf in the bookshop. It describes the lasting ...

Question 60034. Few phrases generate more heat in a Christian conversation than systemic racism, and a good deal of that heat comes from people arguing past one another because they ...

Question 60035. The social gospel is a phrase thrown about in church arguments without anyone stopping to define it, and that is a pity, because the difference it names is ...

Question 60071. Christian Zionism has become a term of abuse in a good deal of Christian writing, used to describe a caricature that almost nobody actually holds. Before I defend ...

Question 60030. Racism is one of the oldest and most persistent evils in human history, and Scripture gives us the tools to name it for what it is. Before we ...

Question 11022. Ask about unreached peoples and you are really asking two questions at once. There is the practical one about the millions who live where no church exists, and ...

Question 60064. Reports of Catholic miracles put an evangelical in an awkward spot, and I think we should admit that rather than reaching for a stock answer. Healings at Lourdes, ...

Question 60065. The practice of praying to Mary and to the saints is one of the sharpest points of difference between Rome and the churches of the Reformation, and it ...

Question 60061. Church abuse scandals are the objection I find hardest to answer, not because the answer is complicated but because the objection is so often justified. Somebody has been ...

Question 60063. The assumption that faith and education pull in opposite directions is so widespread that it barely gets stated, it just hangs in the air. Get educated and you ...

Question 60053. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us ...

Question 60054. Biblical numerology covers two quite different things, and a good deal of confusion comes from muddling them. One is the observation that certain numbers recur in Scripture with ...

Question 60047. Can you be a pro-choice Christian? I want to answer the pro-choice Christian question carefully, because it is almost never asked in the abstract. Behind it there is ...

Question 60052. String theory comes up in church conversations more often than you might expect, usually because somebody has watched a documentary and wants to know whether it undermines Genesis ...

Question 60045. Woke ideology is a term that generates more heat than light, partly because almost nobody who is called woke uses the word about themselves, and partly because it ...

Question 60046. Guns and borders occupy a place in the public witness of some American Christians that puzzles believers almost everywhere else in the world. I am writing as a ...

Question 60070. Whether there is religious freedom in Islamic lands is a question that invites two bad answers. One says no, never, anywhere, which is inaccurate. The other says the ...

Question 60062. Asking whether Roman Catholicism is Christian is a question that needs unpicking before it can be answered, because it is really two questions wearing one coat. Are individual ...

Question 60044. Intersectionality theory began life as a technical term in American legal scholarship and has since become a whole way of seeing the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in ...

Question 60055. Aliens and UFOs are no longer a fringe subject. Governments have released footage, congressional hearings have been held, and polling suggests a substantial minority of people now believe ...

Question 60040. Faith deconstruction has become the standard word for what happens when a believer starts pulling their inherited Christianity apart to see what, if anything, holds. It is worth ...

Question 60041. Theological progressivism is not a denomination and does not have a headquarters, which is part of what makes it difficult to discuss. It is better understood as a ...

Question 60108. Reincarnation is now believed by a surprising number of people in this country, including a fair few who would describe themselves as Christians. Surveys have repeatedly put the ...

Question 60109. Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would ...

Question 60005. Dragons in Scripture turn up more often than most readers realise, and the question of whether anything real stands behind them is not as silly as it sounds ...

Question 60079. Fulfilled prophecy is the one line of evidence that Scripture itself puts forward as a test, which makes it different from every other argument in the apologist's bag ...

Question 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what ...

Question 10103. Soul sleep is the teaching that the dead, believers included, pass into a state of complete unconsciousness at death and know nothing at all until they are raised ...

Question 1099. Gender ideology is one of the most pastorally sensitive subjects I address, because behind every abstract question sits a real person, often someone genuinely struggling, sometimes a parent ...

Question 1012. Scripture teaches that creation reveals God to every person on earth, whether they live under bright city lights or open desert skies, and that truth runs far deeper ...

Question 60026. Few questions divide thoughtful believers as quickly as this one, because modern worship music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong is everywhere. Their songs fill hymn projectors, playlists and ...

Question 60014. Buddhism and Christianity both begin by taking suffering seriously, which is more than most modern philosophies manage, and then they move in opposite directions. That shared starting point ...

Question 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is ...

Question 12029 The transgender movement seemed to arrive suddenly, and that impression is part of why it has been so disorienting. One decade the subject was almost unknown outside specialist ...

Question 12027 Whether sex is a biological reality or a social construct has moved from academic seminars to primary schools in about two decades, which is remarkably fast for an ...

Question 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits ...

Question 60027. Bethel Church in Redding, California has been under sustained public scrutiny for several years now, and the questions have grown sharper rather than quieter. In January 2026 the ...

Question 60066. British Israelism is the claim that the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples of north-western Europe are the physical descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, lost after the ...

Question 60067. Filipino Israelism is the claim that the Filipino people are the descendants of ancient Israel, that the Philippines is the land promised in Scripture, and that the prophecies ...

Question 60024. The New Testament assumes that false teachers will come. Jesus warned about them, Paul warned the Ephesian elders that they would arise from among their own number, and ...

Question 60018. Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is ...

Question 60015. The New Age movement is not a church, a denomination, or an organisation you can join, and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to pin down ...

Question 60020. Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, ...

Question 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, ...

Question 60019. Jehovah's Witnesses are probably the group my church members ask me about most, for the simple reason that they are the ones who knock. Few movements are so ...

Question 60075. The cover-up culture that has come to light across parts of the charismatic and independent church world over the last decade is one of the saddest things I ...

Question 60074. The New Apostolic Reformation is the most influential movement in global charismatic Christianity that most churchgoers have never heard named. Its songs are sung in congregations that would ...

Question 01003. The amount of biblical prophecy in Scripture is one of its most distinctive features, and people are often surprised when they discover just how much of the Bible ...

Question 60073. The Turning revival began in Reading in 2016 and for a while it was the most talked about thing in British evangelicalism. Reports of hundreds and then thousands ...

Question 9110. The Evangelical Baptist Network is a relatively recent body, and it exists because of a specific crisis inside Baptists Together, the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It grew ...

Question 60072. The Latter Rain movement began in a small Canadian town in 1948 and has shaped far more of modern charismatic Christianity than most of its heirs realise. Its ...

Question 60025. Modern political thinking has almost no category for national sin. Nations are treated as power structures, economies, or administrative units, and the idea that a country as a ...

Question 60098. Peter's gospel and Paul's gospel are treated by some teachers as two different messages, with the consequence that only Paul's letters, and in the more extreme versions only ...

Question 60003. I hold a young earth position, and I want to tell you why before I tell you how careful I intend to be about it. This is a ...

Question 60004. Looking for dinosaurs in Scripture is one of the first things a curious child does once they discover that the Bible starts with animals and that their favourite ...

Question 60007. What about other religions is rarely a neutral enquiry. Behind it usually stands a colleague, a neighbour, a daughter in law, somebody sincere and kind who believes something ...

Question 60008. Asking what makes Christianity unique invites a certain kind of answer, the sort that lists our advantages and sounds rather pleased with itself. I want to avoid that, ...

Question 60006. The problem of evil is the objection I take most seriously, and the one I am slowest to answer quickly. It is the argument that if God is ...

Question 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations ...

Question 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty ...

Question 10116. Scripture says nothing directly about near-death experiences as a category, and that silence is itself instructive. What the Bible gives us instead is a settled account of what ...

Question 60002. Darwinian evolution is the account of origins that most of us absorbed before we could evaluate it, in classrooms and documentaries and museum captions, and it arrives with ...

Question 60049. Primal heresy is the name I give to the oldest lie ever told, the one that arrived in a garden and has been repackaged in every generation since ...

Question 60051. Are Islam and Christianity compatible? The question is asked in several different senses, and a great deal of confusion comes from answering one sense while the questioner meant ...

Question 60076 Yinka Oyekan is one of the more visible and genuinely complex figures in contemporary British Baptist life. He is a man of obvious energy, real commitment to evangelism, ...

Question 60077. Peter tells us to be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, and I suspect that ...

Question 60091. The Canaanite conquest is the passage in the Old Testament I am asked about more than any other, and it deserves better than the two standard responses. One ...

Question 60029. Every so often someone tells me that the historical Jesus never existed, that He was invented by the early church out of older myths, and that the whole ...

Question 60043 The resurrection of Jesus is not a blind leap of faith but a claim about history that can be examined. When we look at the evidence, we find ...

Question 60078. Whether the Gospel accounts accurately record what Jesus said is the question underneath a great many others, and it deserves a proper answer rather than an assertion about ...

Question 60080. Orthodox theosis is one of those doctrines that sounds alarming to evangelical ears and turns out, on examination, to be a good deal more careful than the word ...

Question 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would ...

Question 60085 Few passages in the New Testament have generated more interpretive discussion than 1 Peter 3:18–20: "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that ...

Question 60092. Slavery in Scripture is raised more often as an accusation than as a question, and I understand why. The charge is that the Bible not only tolerates slavery ...

Question 60096. The book of Jonah divides readers more sharply than almost any other short piece of the Old Testament. A prophet runs from God, is thrown overboard, is swallowed ...

Question 60097. Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the Red Sea. Wind setdown models, tsunami theories, and the argument ...

Question 60099. The cosmological argument begins with a question that turns out to be remarkably resistant to any answer that does not involve God: why is there something rather than ...

Question 60100. The teleological argument looks at the natural world, notices that it bears the marks of purpose, and asks what that implies. The name comes from the Greek telos, ...

Question 60101. The moral argument starts with something so ordinary that it is easy to walk past. Human beings make moral judgements and expect them to carry real weight. When ...

Question 60102. The ontological argument is the most demanding of the classical arguments for God's existence and easily the most disputed. Unlike the cosmological or teleological arguments, which move from ...

Question 60103. Divine hiddenness is the polite name philosophers give to a complaint most of us have made at some point, usually at two in the morning. If God is ...

Question 60105. Natural disasters are the version of the problem of evil that is hardest to answer, and I want to say at the outset that I know it. Human ...

Question 60106. Moral evil is the wickedness that people do to one another, and it is the sharpest form of the oldest objection to the Christian faith. If God is ...

Question 60107. Theodicy is the technical name for the attempt to defend the goodness and power of God in a world that contains suffering. The word was coined by Gottfried ...

Question 60201. Omnipotence is the doctrine this old puzzle is designed to break. Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He can, there is ...

Question 60023. Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person ...

Question 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere ...

Question 60022. The resurrection of Jesus is not one Christian belief among many. It is the claim on which everything else stands or falls, and the New Testament says so ...

Question 12045. Defending religious liberty while believing that idolatry is a sin against God feels, to a lot of people, like holding two contradictory positions at once. I get asked ...

Question 60083. Bultmann's demythologisation is one of those pieces of academic vocabulary that sounds harmless and turns out to be anything but. Rudolf Bultmann, who lived from 1884 to 1976 ...

Question 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature ...

Question 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this ...

Question 2079. Pharaoh's hardened heart troubles many readers of Exodus for a very understandable reason: if God hardened Pharaoh's heart, how could Pharaoh be justly held responsible for refusing to ...

Question 2075. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, ...

Question 60093. Cain's wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air ...

Question 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a ...

Question 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown's novel, to have been assembled by the ...

Question 60094. A global flood is what Genesis 6 to 9 appears to describe, and a great many Christians now hold instead that the deluge was a large regional inundation ...

Question 60095. Firmament is a word most people meet only in the King James Version of Genesis 1, and it has generated a surprising amount of argument. Critics of the ...

Question 04117. Third wave charismatic is the name usually given to a movement that emerged among evangelical, non-Pentecostal churches in the 1980s, most closely associated with John Wimber and the ...

Question 04118. Spiritual impartation is the phrase charismatic circles use so often that many Christians employ it without ever pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches ...

Question 1082. Biblical archaeology has quietly become one of the most persuasive answers I can give a sceptical friend, because it deals in something they cannot simply wave away: dirt, ...

Question 1083. Scientific errors are what critics claim to find scattered through the Bible, arguing that Scripture reflects the primitive cosmology of ancient peoples and cannot be trusted as God's ...

Question 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to ...

Question 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern ...

Question 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the ...

Question 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about ...

Question 1129. Biblical literalism gets blamed for a great deal it never actually claimed, and nowhere is the confusion thicker than in the running argument between Scripture and science. People ...

Question 01151. Biblical authority runs into the same objection almost every time I discuss it with a thoughtful sceptic: is it not simply circular reasoning to say the Bible is ...

Question 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and ...

Question 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament ...

Question 60088. Science and Scripture are widely assumed to be locked in permanent conflict, and the assumption does a great deal of quiet damage. It shows up in newspapers, in ...

Question 1142. General revelation is God's self disclosure through the created order, through history, and through the human conscience, available in principle to every person who has ever lived, whether ...

Question 60089. Objective truth has become the one claim you are not allowed to make in polite company. That may be true for you but not for me sounds tolerant ...

Question 60090. Faith and reason are assumed by almost everybody to be opposites, and the assumption has done real damage to Christian witness. On one side stands the believer who ...

Question 1146. Textual corruption is the accusation I hear most often from people who have never actually looked at how the Bible was copied, only heard somewhere that thousands of ...

Question 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away ...

Question 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that ...

Question 60001. Nobody teaches most of us how to defend the faith. We learn to pray, we learn to find Habakkuk without the contents page, and then one day a ...

Question 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments ...

Question 1098. Critical race theory has become one of the most contested phrases in public conversation, and church members ask me about it often enough that I want to address ...

Question 60042. The Western Wall stands in Jerusalem today, some fifty courses of ancient stone, and every year millions of people place prayers into its cracks. Sceptics point at it ...

Question 10041.Sceptics love to wave 1 Kings 9 in my face and claim the temple promise God made to Solomon collapsed in ruins, so the Bible cannot be trusted after ...

Question 00048.The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer ...

Question 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an ...

Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because ...

Question 8015. Nephilim giants are one of those biblical subjects where sober readers go quiet and speculative readers go loud, and the result is that most Christians have no settled ...

Question 2000. God's existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see ...

Standing with Israel in Biblical Truth and Justice Q10141 Preamble As an Evangelical Baptist committed to the authority of Scripture and the unchanging promises of God, I find myself compelled ...