Apologetics

Question 60074 The New Apostolic Reformation, Ché Ahn's Harvest International Ministry, and Bethel Church in Redding, California under Bill Johnson represent three interconnected expressions of what has become one of ...

Question 01003 The Bible is frequently described as a prophetic book, and with good reason. A substantial portion of its content involves prophecy in one form or another, whether foretelling ...

Question 60073 In the late spring of 2016, news began spreading through British evangelical and charismatic networks that something unusual was happening on the streets of Reading. The Gate Church, ...

Question 09110 The Evangelical Baptist Network is not an old institution. It grew out of a very specific crisis within Baptists Together (the Baptist Union of Great Britain) over the ...

Question 60072 Few movements in modern church history have proved more persistently influential or more theologically problematic than the Latter Rain revival of the late 1940s and the doctrine of ...

Question 60025 The idea that nations are morally accountable to God is increasingly foreign to modern political thinking, which tends to treat nations as power structures rather than moral agents ...

Question 60084 The Gospel of Thomas is regularly cited in documentaries, popular books, and online discussions as evidence of suppressed early Christianity — a hidden text that the orthodox church ...

Question 60098 The claim that Peter and Paul preached fundamentally different gospels is associated with a strand of dispensational teaching sometimes called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism. In its more extreme forms, ...

Question 60003 How old is the earth? This question sits at the intersection of science and Scripture, and it generates strong opinions on all sides. Mainstream science tells us the ...

Question 60004 Dinosaurs capture the imagination like few other creatures. Children are fascinated by them, museums display their bones, and films bring them roaring back to life. But for many ...

Question 60007 We live in a world of religious diversity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and countless other faiths claim the allegiance of billions of people. In an age of ...

Question 60008 In a marketplace of competing worldviews and religions, what sets Christianity apart? Is it simply one option among many, differing from others only in cultural expressions and historical ...

Question 60006 If God is all-powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all-loving, He would want to prevent evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore, either God is not all-powerful, not ...

Question 1116 Few passages in Scripture trouble modern readers more than God's commands to Israel to destroy the Canaanite nations. When God instructs Joshua, "You shall devote them to complete ...

Question 1133 The word "deconstruction" has become unavoidable in Christian conversations. Social media is filled with stories of people, often raised in evangelical churches, who are dismantling their faith, questioning ...

Question 10116 Near-death experiences (NDEs) have fascinated people for decades. Books like Heaven Is for Real and 90 Minutes in Heaven have sold millions of copies. Many people claim to ...

Question 60002 Evolution causes quite heated arguments between Christians and Christians, and Christians and unbelievers. Is evolution the triumph of science over religion, proof that we do not need God ...

Question 60049 The serpent's temptation in the Garden of Eden established a pattern that has repeated throughout human history. Satan's approach to Eve—questioning God's Word, denying God's judgment, and promising ...

Question 60051 In an age of religious pluralism, many suggest that Islam and Christianity are compatible faiths—perhaps different paths to the same God. Some point to shared figures like Abraham, ...

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's first letter was written to believers scattered across Asia Minor—what we now call Turkey—who were facing increasing hostility for their faith. These were real people in real ...

Question 60091 The Canaanite conquest narratives in Joshua are among the passages most frequently raised as moral objections to the Old Testament, and they deserve honest engagement rather than evasion ...

Question 60029 From time to time, someone claims that Jesus never existed, that He was a myth invented by the early church. You might encounter this view online or in ...

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 Sceptics sometimes ask how we can trust that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are actually what He said. After all, the Gospels were written decades ...

Question 60080 On the surface, certain strands of Eastern Orthodox teaching and New Age spirituality appear to say something strikingly similar: that human beings can become divine. The Orthodox doctrine ...

Question 7062 Judas Iscariot is one of the most disturbing figures in Scripture. He spent three years in Jesus' company, witnessed miracles, heard the Sermon on the Mount, was numbered ...

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 Few questions are asked with more rhetorical intent than this one, and yet it deserves a thorough biblical answer rather than an apologetic retreat. The charge is typically ...

Question 60096 The question of whether Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and survived is one that divides those who approach Scripture assuming miracles cannot occur and those who ...

Question 60097 Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the waters at the Exodus. Wind setdown models, tsunami hypotheses, and ...

Question 60099 The cosmological argument is one of the oldest and most debated arguments for God's existence, and it begins with a question that turns out to be surprisingly resistant ...

Question 60100 The teleological argument observes that the natural world bears the marks of design and asks what this implies about the designer. "Teleological" comes from the Greek telos, meaning ...

Question 60101 The moral argument begins with something so familiar that it is easily overlooked: human beings make moral judgements and expect them to carry real weight. When we say ...

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

Question 60103 This question comes in several forms. Why doesn't God simply appear in the sky and settle the matter? Why doesn't He perform an undeniable miracle that removes all ...

Question 60105 When an earthquake kills tens of thousands, when a tsunami sweeps away everything a family has built, when a community watches a wildfire consume their homes and livelihoods ...

Question 60106 Of all the questions people bring to God, this one carries the heaviest weight. Why does a God who is both perfectly good and all-powerful allow the abuse ...

Question 60107 Theodicy is not a word most people encounter outside of theology or philosophy, yet it names one of the most pressing questions anyone can ask: how can a ...

Question 60108 The question is a classic philosophical puzzle, usually deployed as a challenge to the coherence of believing in God at all. It runs like this: if God is ...

Question 04114 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, ...

Question 60104 Twice in the opening chapters of Revelation, Jesus singles out a group called the Nicolaitans — once commending the church at Ephesus for hating their deeds (Revelation 2:6), ...

Question 60022 The claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is either the most important fact in human history or the most successful deception ever perpetrated. There ...

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 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 02057 Molinism is a theological framework developed to explain how God can exercise complete providential control over history while human beings retain genuine freedom of choice. It has attracted ...

Question 02058 Middle knowledge — Latin scientia media — is the theological concept at the centre of Molinism. It refers to God's knowledge of what any free creature would do ...

Question 2079 The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is one of the most theologically contested passages in the Old Testament, and it has been pressed into service in support of Calvinist ...

Question 2075 Of all the objections raised against the God of the Bible, this one carries perhaps the most emotional force. The conquest of Canaan, in which God commanded Israel ...

Question 60093 This question has been posed as a sceptical challenge to the historical reliability of Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, when Archbishop James Ussher was reportedly confronted ...

Question 60082 The Word of Faith movement is one of the most widely diffused streams of popular Christianity in the world today, with roots in mid-twentieth century America and branches ...

Question 60087 The claim that Constantine created the Bible appears regularly in popular sceptical discussions, was given wide circulation by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, and resurfaces periodically ...

Question 60094 The account of Noah and the flood in Genesis 6–9 is one of the most contested passages in all of Scripture. At stake is not merely a point ...

Question 60095 The word "firmament" appears in the King James Version of Genesis 1 and has generated considerable discussion ever since, particularly as critics of the biblical account have claimed ...

Question 04117 If you have spent any time in charismatic circles you will almost certainly have encountered the idea that God has been moving in successive waves of the Spirit ...

Question 04118 The word "impartation" has become so standard in charismatic vocabulary that many Christians use it without pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches. The ...

Question 1082 For centuries, sceptics dismissed much of the Bible as myth and legend. They claimed that people groups mentioned in Scripture never existed, that cities described were fictional, and ...

Question 1083 Critics often claim the Bible contains scientific errors—that it reflects the primitive understanding of ancient peoples and cannot be trusted as God's Word. They point to passages about ...

Question 1065 In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of scholars calling themselves the "Jesus Seminar" made headlines by voting on which sayings of Jesus in the Gospels were authentic ...

Question 1114 Anyone who has read the Bible seriously has encountered passages that puzzle, trouble, or even disturb. Genealogies that seem pointless, prophecies that remain obscure, apparent contradictions between accounts, ...

Question 1134 We live in a religiously diverse world. Many religions claim to possess sacred scriptures: Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the ...

Question 1131 We live in strange times. "Post-truth" was named the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year back in 2016, and things have not improved since then. It describes ...

Question 1129 This question gets at something important: when we say we take the Bible literally, does that commit us to a particular view of science? And when scientists speak ...

Question 1151 The accusation lands regularly in apologetic discussions: "You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible—that's circular reasoning!" On the surface, this seems like a devastating objection to ...

Question 1016 The Bible was written across roughly fifteen centuries, in three languages, by more than forty human authors in widely different circumstances — kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners, and ...

Question 1015 The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices; the New Testament says Christ has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples; the ...

Question 60088 The assumption that science and the Bible are locked in fundamental conflict is one of the most widely held in contemporary culture. It surfaces in popular journalism, in ...

Question 01142 God has not left Himself without witness. From the intricacy of a living cell to the voice of conscience that will not be entirely silenced, something of God ...

Question 60089 The claim that all truth is relative has moved from university philosophy departments into everyday conversation, social media, and church life. "That may be true for you but ...

Question 60090 The assumption that faith and reason are opposed to each other is deeply embedded in popular culture, and it has done significant damage to Christian witness. The image ...

Question 01146 The claim that the Bible has been corrupted through centuries of copying and translation is perhaps one of the most commonly heard objections to biblical authority. It sounds ...

Question 01163 The Documentary Hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, was the dominant critical framework for understanding the origin of the Pentateuch throughout the nineteenth and much of the ...

Question 60081 A Christian student entering a university biblical studies department for the first time can find the experience genuinely disorienting. Lecturers who have devoted their academic careers to the ...

Question 60001 Every believer, at some point, will be asked to give a reason for why they believe what they believe. Whether it comes from a sceptical colleague, a curious ...

Question 1097 The term "woke" has become widespread in cultural discourse, describing a progressive worldview that emphasises systemic oppression, identity politics, and social justice as understood through contemporary leftist frameworks ...

Question 1098 Critical Race Theory, often abbreviated CRT, has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary society and increasingly within the church. Some embrace it as a necessary ...

Question 60042 This is a question that sceptics love to raise. If Jesus said that not one stone would be left upon another, how is it that the Western Wall—also ...

Question 10041 In 1 Kings 9:3, God tells Solomon: "I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will ...

Question 0048 It sounds so reasonable, so irenic, so Christian. "Doctrine divides, but Jesus unites." The sentiment is appealing, especially to those weary of theological controversy and ecclesiastical strife. Why ...

Question 60000 Apologetics is the defence of the Christian faith. The word comes from the Greek ἀπολογία (apologia), meaning "a reasoned defence" or "a speech in defence." It is the ...

Question 0005 The word "theologian" carries a certain mystique. We imagine scholars in book-lined studies, poring over ancient manuscripts, debating the fine points of doctrine in language most people cannot ...

Question 8015 The Bible speaks clearly about giants existing in ancient times. The Hebrew word נְפִילִים (Nephilim) appears in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, and these were real, physical beings ...

Question 2000 This might be the most important question anyone ever asks. Is God real, and how can we actually know? Unlike some philosophical puzzles, this one has real answers ...

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 ...