Bibliology (Bible)

Question 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the ...

Question 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with ...

Question 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something ...

Question 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul's own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for ...

Question 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one ...

Question 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology ...

Question 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that ...

Question 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed ...

Question 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a ...

Question 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays ...

Question 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations ...

Question 52. Confessional Christianity describes churches and believers who hold to a formal, written confession of faith, a Baptist confession, a Reformed catechism, a denominational statement, as a settled, publicly ...

Question 51. The analogy of faith is a hermeneutical principle stating that Scripture should always be interpreted in harmony with itself, so that no single passage is read in a ...

Question 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature ...

Question 47. Doctrinal disagreement between sincere Christians reading the very same Bible is a question that troubles many thoughtful believers, and it deserves a more careful answer than either of ...

Question 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of ...

Question 44. Doctrinal development describes the genuine, historically observable way the church's articulation of certain doctrines has grown sharper and more precise across the centuries, without the underlying truth itself ...

Question 43. Changing your mind on a doctrine as you mature is not automatically a sign of instability or spiritual drift, though it can feel that way, especially if you ...

Question 42. Cafeteria Christianity describes the practice of selecting which biblical teachings to accept and which to quietly set aside, much as a diner moves along a cafeteria line choosing ...

Question 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously ...

Question 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, ...

Question 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the ...

Question 26. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy describe two dimensions of genuine Christian faithfulness that Scripture never allows to be separated, even though believers regularly drift toward emphasising one at the expense ...

Question 22. Guarding the deposit is Paul's own phrase for one of the central responsibilities he hands to Timothy near the end of his life, and it captures something important ...

Question 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every ...

Question 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as ...

Question 11. Divine accommodation is the term theologians use for a simple but important fact: God, who is infinite, eternal, and utterly beyond our full comprehension, has chosen to reveal ...

Question 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul's letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as ...

Question 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the ...

Question 10203. Let me tell you plainly why dispensationalism matters so much to me, because it is not a dry label that I wear but a way of reading the ...

Question 1022. formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence describe two competing philosophies of Bible translation, and understanding the difference will genuinely change how you read the footnotes and prefaces of whatever ...

Question 1160. Aramaic passages appear in the Old Testament at a handful of specific points, and the first time someone notices this in Daniel or Ezra, they usually assume it ...

Question 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus ...

Question 1170. Concursive inspiration is the term theologians use for the way God produced Scripture through human authors without either overriding their personalities or leaving the outcome to human judgement ...

Question 1164. Interpreting biblical prophecy rightly is, I think, one of the more neglected disciplines in the church today, and one of the most abused outside it. Whole sections of ...

Question 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden ...

Question 1177. Old Testament narrative makes up a larger share of Scripture than any other single genre, the accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, the exodus from ...

Question 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I ...

Question 1029. Hebrew poetry does not work the way English poetry does, and readers who go looking for rhyme or a regular metre come away thinking the Psalms and Proverbs ...

Question 1178. New Testament epistles make up a large part of the New Testament, thirteen from Paul alone, plus further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to ...

Question 1023. The ESV translation philosophy is worth understanding on its own terms rather than assuming it works exactly the same way as every other modern English Bible, because the ...

Question 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and ...

Question 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently ...

Question 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted ...

Question 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the ...

Question 1185. What is the book of Jasher mentioned in Joshua and 2 Samuel, and should its brief, tantalising appearances in Scripture make us curious about a lost inspired text? ...

Question 1189. The apostles' handling of prophetic fulfilment can look bewildering to a modern reader trained to expect a strict one to one correspondence between a prediction and its outcome ...

Question 1180. Can an ordinary believer genuinely study the Bible well without ever learning a word of Greek or Hebrew? I get this question often, usually from someone who has ...

Question 1179. Wisdom literature occupies a strange and wonderful middle section of the Old Testament, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, and it is read badly more often ...

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 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is ...

Question 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and ...

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 01006. People use the words prophecy and prediction as though they mean the same thing, but prophecy and prediction are not identical, and the difference matters more than you ...

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 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest ...

Question 1013. The phrase apocalyptic literature turns up constantly in biblical studies, and if you do not understand what it means you will struggle to read whole stretches of the ...

Question 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what ...

Question 1035. Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has ...

Question 1119. Old Testament prophets received God's word through a range of different means, and Scripture itself is refreshingly candid about how varied that process actually was. Some received visions ...

Question 1141. Misunderstood Bible phrases circulate everywhere, in sermons, in devotionals, on inspirational graphics shared across social media, and popular culture has never been particularly careful about accuracy when it ...

Question 01173. The Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament represent two different approaches to reconstructing the wording of Scripture, and understanding the difference between them clears up ...

Question 01176. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament that stands behind almost every modern English translation, the ESV included, and understanding what it ...

Question 1183. Is the book of Esdras a book we should read, and does it belong anywhere near our study of Scripture? People find the name confusing before they even ...

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 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with ...

Question 1200. Some of the most commonly misinterpreted verses in the whole Bible are also some of the most quoted, which is exactly why the confusion spreads so widely. A ...

Question 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would ...

Question 01005. If the Bible is clear, why do sincere Christians disagree so often about what it teaches? This is one of the most honest questions believers ask, usually when ...

Question 1008. The question of dreams and visions and prophecy today stirs up real confusion and no small amount of division in the church. Does God still speak through such ...

Question 1079. People ask me what the best Bible translation and the honest answer is that it depends rather a lot on what you are trying to do with it ...

Question 1080. Have we lost books of the Bible? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just read a footnote mentioning the ...

Question 1077. Manuscript transmission is the unglamorous term for a question that genuinely keeps some people awake at night: how do we know the Bible we hold today says what ...

Question 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version ...

Question 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine ...

Question 01068. Biblical inspiration means something far more precise than the loose, everyday sense in which we might call a piece of music or a great novel inspired. It is ...

Question 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only ...

Question 01066. Whether the Bible is really God's Word is, I think, the single most foundational question anyone can ask about the Christian faith, because everything else depends on the ...

Question 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God's Word, and I ...

Question 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak ...

Question 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves ...

Question 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee ...

Question 1074. Why these sixty-six books, and not more, and not fewer? It is a fair question, and one I would rather answer directly than wave away with an appeal ...

Question 1075. The Old Testament Apocrypha sits quietly on the shelf of most study Bibles that include it, and I get asked about it more often than you might expect, ...

Question 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they ...

Question 1081. Prophecy fulfilment is, in my judgement, one of the strongest evidences we have for the divine origin of Scripture, and I do not say that lightly after years ...

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 1084. Biblical genealogies can seem tedious to modern readers, long lists of unpronounceable names we are tempted to skip on our way to the next narrative section. Yet these ...

Question 1085. Biblical numbers appear throughout Scripture: forty days of flood, seven churches, twelve tribes, 144,000 sealed servants, 666 as the number of the beast. Are these figures meant literally, ...

Question 1086. Numerical patterns in Scripture fascinate people, and I understand why they do. Some claim to have discovered elaborate numerical patterns hidden in the biblical text, patterns they say ...

Question 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church ...

Question 1089. Scripture in counselling is where I keep returning whenever I sit with someone in pain, because the Bible speaks to the whole person, not only to their beliefs ...

Question 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say ...

Question 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word "meditation" now carries associations that have ...

Question 1093. AI Bible study is something I get asked about often now, usually by people who are not sure whether using a tool like this on their Bible reading ...

Question 1094. Bible apps have changed how most of us meet with Scripture each morning, and I think that change deserves more thought than a shrug and a download. I ...

Question 1096. Bible movies and dramatic readings have exploded in popularity over the last few years, and I get asked about them often enough that I think the question deserves ...

Question 1095. Audio Bible listening has become one of the most common ways church members tell me they get through Scripture, usually confessed with a slightly apologetic tone, as though ...

Question 1102. The dual authorship of Scripture is one of those doctrines that sounds like a contradiction until you actually sit with it, because we are so used to thinking ...

Question 1103. Verse divisions feel so permanent, printed neatly into every Bible you own, that it is easy to assume they came down from Sinai along with everything else. They ...

Question 1104. Old Testament quotations in the New Testament rarely match their source word for word, and if you line up Matthew’s citation of Isaiah next to your Old Testament ...

Question 1106. Biblical preservation is a doctrine people often assume promises far more than it actually claims, and getting the scope right matters enormously, especially once you learn that our ...

Question 1036. Creeds and confessions are summaries, not sources. That single sentence answers most of the confusion I encounter around this question. A creed does not add to what Scripture ...

Question 1037. Literal interpretation is the single most misunderstood term in the whole discussion of how we read the Bible, mostly because critics and defenders alike often use it to ...

Question 1038. Allegorical interpretation treats a biblical text as a coded surface concealing a deeper, often quite different, spiritual meaning beneath it, and it has a long and influential history ...

Question 1039. Biblical typology is the study of persons, events, and institutions in the Old Testament that God designed in advance to prefigure greater realities fulfilled in Christ and the ...

Question 1040. Biblical genre is the single most overlooked factor in careless Bible reading, and identifying it correctly is not an optional refinement of interpretation but a basic requirement of ...

Question 1031. biblical sufficiency is the settled conviction that Scripture provides everything a believer genuinely needs for faith and godly living, and I want to be precise about exactly what ...

Question 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of ...

Question 1033. Scripture interprets Scripture is one of those phrases preachers use so often that it risks sounding like a slogan rather than a method. In practice it names something ...

Question 1034. Special revelation is not God's only way of making Himself known, but it is His only sufficient way of making Himself known for salvation, and that distinction answers ...

Question 1041. Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not ...

Question 1043. Eisegesis and exegesis sound like a pair of obscure Greek terms you could safely ignore, but the difference between them decides whether a sermon, a Bible study, or ...

Question 1044. Cultural and historical context is not an optional extra for serious Bible readers, it is the very air the text was written to breathe. When Paul wrote to ...

Question 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting ...

Question 1051.The Samaritan Pentateuch sounds like the kind of obscure manuscript detail that only specialists need worry about, but it raises a question worth answering plainly: if the Samaritans have ...

Question 1052.A good commentary is not always easy to spot on a crowded shelf, and that is the honest problem behind this question. Walk into any Christian bookshop, or browse ...

Question 1054.Bible study tools multiply faster than most of us can keep track of, with software, websites and apps proliferating alongside the traditional printed options, and the choice can feel ...

Question 1055. marking your Bible is not only permitted, I would go further and say it is one of the more underused tools available to an ordinary Christian who wants ...

Question 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every ...

Question 1047. Septuagint quotations appear throughout the New Testament far more often than most readers realise, and noticing this raises a fair question. If Jesus and the apostles regarded the ...

Question 1049. Few passages in the Gospels are as beloved as the story of the woman caught adultery, found in John 7:53 through 8:11. Jesus' words, "let him who is ...

Question 1050.The Johannine Comma is the name given to a few extra words that appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and nowhere in modern translations, and ...

Question 1048. If you open your Bible to the end of Mark's Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark's longer ending does not appear in the earliest ...

Question 1056. memorising Scripture is one of the most quietly transformative habits available to any Christian, and I say that as someone who finds it genuinely hard work rather than ...

Question 1059. children's Bibles are not simply acceptable for young children, they are, in my experience raising and teaching children over many years, one of the most effective tools available ...

Question 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ...

Question 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we ...

Question 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various ...

Question 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes ...

Question 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark's Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of ...

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 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving ...

Question 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes ...

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 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads ...

Question 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might ...

Question 1113. Biblical manuscript materials range from stone and clay to papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and tracing what the prophets and apostles actually wrote on takes us right into the ...

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 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost ...

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 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe ...

Question 1130. Dispensational hermeneutics gets accused, fairly often and rather confidently, of playing a shell game with the biblical text: reading the Old Testament literally when it suits the argument ...

Question 1125. Biblical genealogies have glazed over more eyes than almost any other section of Scripture. "And so-and-so fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so," page after page, and it is entirely ...

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 1120. Does literal interpretation require a young earth position? I hold both a literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic and a young earth reading of Genesis, and I think the two are connected ...

Question 1124. Understanding Scripture is not always straightforward, and if you have ever hit a passage that made no sense at all, read it twice, maybe three times, and remained ...

Question 10020. Unconditional covenants and conditional covenants are the two hinges on which all of biblical prophecy swings, and learning to tell them apart is, I would argue, the single ...

Question 01001.KJV Onlyism is the conviction, held in various strengths by various people, that the King James Version of 1611 is the only Bible English-speaking Christians ought to use, and ...

Question 01002.Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its ...

Question 01007. Do you need scholars to understand Scripture, or can an ordinary believer read the Bible and grasp it for themselves? Christians tend to fall off this horse on ...

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 1053.Study Bibles are everywhere you look. Walk into any Christian bookshop and you will find shelves of them, leather-bound, colour-coded, themed for men, women, teenagers and almost every niche ...

Question 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to ...

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 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those ...

Question 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how ...

Question 1018. Textual criticism can sound alarming when you first hear the phrase, as though scholars are sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is ...

Question 1204. The faith once delivered to the saints is the phrase Jude reaches for when he explains why his short, urgent letter changed direction partway through the opening line ...

Question 1203. Inspiration and illumination are two words that get used almost interchangeably in casual church conversation, and the blur causes real confusion. People will say a sermon was inspired ...

Question 1020. The Bible's main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching ...

Question 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no ...

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 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them ...

Question 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is ...

Question 1028. The Holy Spirit's role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with ...

Question 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture's own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand ...

Question 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through ...

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 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit's genuine, active work in a believer's life gets confused constantly with the very different ...

Question 1149. The Spirit's inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same ...

Question 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt ...

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 1147. The sufficiency of Scripture is a claim that sounds simple until someone asks you to define exactly what it does and does not cover, and I find most ...

Question 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to ...

Question 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story ...

Question 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one ...

Question 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to ...

Question 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I ...

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 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation ...

Question 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in ...

Question 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can ...

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 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from ...

Question 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People ...

Question 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest ...

Question 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems ...

Question 20. How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would ...

Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of ...

Question 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value ...

Question 23. Why did Paul always start his letters with doctrine before application rather than practical instruction? Once you notice this pattern of doctrine before application, you cannot unsee it, ...

Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The ...

Question 01000.To say that Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail, cannot deceive, and cannot lead astray in anything it sets out to teach us. The word itself reaches ...

Question 01004. The question of scriptural reliability becomes very pointed when we ask whether the apostles' fallen nature corrupted the doctrines they taught. It is a fair thing to wonder ...

Question 1139. Equipped for every good work is the phrase Paul uses to describe the purpose of Scripture in the life of a believer, and it comes at the climax ...

Question 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly ...

Question 1138. Rightly handling Scripture is what the apostle Paul commands every believer who teaches or studies the Bible to do, and the phrase comes from one of the most ...

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 1107. Manuscript discoveries make headlines from time to time, a newly identified papyrus fragment, an early codex found in a monastery library, and each one raises the same anxious ...

Question 1101. I hold to verbal plenary inspiration without embarrassment, and it is worth being precise about what the doctrine actually claims, because plenty of people, believers and sceptics alike, ...

Question 1140. Filthy rags is the phrase most Christians know from Isaiah 64:6, quoted in countless evangelistic sermons, including plenty of my own over the years, to prove that even ...

Question 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew ...

Question 1105. Grammatical irregularities do appear here and there in the Greek New Testament, and the book of Revelation is the most famous case, containing what specialists call solecisms, places ...

Question 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth ...

Question 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather ...

Question 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships ...

Question 6. Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it ...

Question 4. Why does Paul call right teaching sound doctrine, and what does the word sound actually mean? When he tells Titus to 'teach what accords with sound doctrine' (Titus ...

Question 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, 'All ...

Question 0. Why do I keep going to the Bible for answers when the world is full of other voices? It is a fair question, and it sits right at ...