Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary of the excesses they have seen in certain corners of the charismatic movement, quietly stop asking God for physical healing altogether. Scripture never gives us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2061. I hear this question often, sometimes gently and sometimes with real frustration: why does God seem so different in the Old Testament, commanding conquest and judgment, compared to the New Testament, where Jesus speaks of love and mercy? The honest answer begins with God’s unchanging character, because the God of the Old Testament…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2007. Genesis 2:2-3 tells me that God finished His work of creation and rested on the seventh day, and that simple statement about seventh day rest raises an obvious question the moment I stop to think about it, one that catches most thoughtful readers sooner or later. God does not get tired. He does…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 11120. Raising hands in worship is one of those things that can make an otherwise unremarkable Sunday morning feel suddenly loaded, because the moment someone’s arms go up in a congregation that does not usually do that, half the room is thinking about God and the other half is thinking about the person with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 features of the world to a conclusion about God, this one attempts to establish God’s existence from the concept of God alone, without any appeal…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 we say that torturing a child for entertainment is wrong, we do not mean that we personally dislike it, or that our society happens to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, meaning end or goal, and the claim is that when we examine the universe at any scale, from the calibration of the physical constants to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 nothing? The universe exists. Matter, energy, space and time exist. Where did they come from, and why is there anything at all to ask the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 suggests. Deification, becoming god, partaking of the divine nature. Put like that it sounds like the serpent’s offer in the garden. But the Eastern churches…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 his prison epistles, apply to the church today. The position is usually called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism, and it needs answering carefully because it grows out…