Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 a longer beard. It is a natural assumption and it is not accurate. The faith practised in synagogues today took its present shape after the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 country might be morally accountable to God sounds to most ears like something left over from an older world. Scripture takes an entirely different view,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 1989 to describe a real problem: a black woman suing for discrimination could find that the courts recognised race claims and sex claims but had…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 method, a way of handling Scripture and doctrine which assumes that the church is on a journey away from its past and towards a fuller…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 Peter, John and Jude each devote substantial space to the problem. The question is never whether they exist. It is how ordinary believers, without a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, because the things that actually set the gospel apart are not achievements we can be smug about. Every one of them is something done to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 noticing that the church has a much older word for a similar process, and that word is reformation. The two are not the same, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 else, and the real question is whether I am prepared to say that person is wrong. So let me answer it honestly and without the…