Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 with a bluntness that always surprises people who expect religion to hedge. Paul writes that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 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 harm some people carry from their experience of church, and the first thing I want to say is that the harm is often real. I…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 entirely good and entirely powerful, then the suffering in this world should not exist, and since it plainly does, one of those attributes has to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 shall all live together in easy tolerance. That was the sales pitch. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement in recent years knows that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, the litigation and the shopfronts on the high street offering a free personality test, and very little else. What the organisation teaches at its higher…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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. Every continent has dragon stories, and cultures with no contact produced descriptions with striking family resemblances. I am going to take the question seriously without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 that each of us carries an authentic inner self, that the highest good is to discover and express that self, and that anything which restrains…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, speak warmly about Jesus, ask about your family, and offer to pray. Nothing in that encounter tells you that you are meeting a different religion,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 creature seems to be missing. It is a fair question, and it deserves better than a nervous change of subject. The short answer is that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 widely recognised and so little understood. Most people know the door to door work, the magazines, the refusal of blood transfusions and the absence of…