Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60035. The social gospel is a phrase thrown about in church arguments without anyone stopping to define it, and that is a pity, because the difference it names is real. I have sat in meetings where a good man was accused of preaching the social gospel because he wanted the church to open a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60003. I hold a young earth position, and I want to tell you why before I tell you how careful I intend to be about it. This is a question where Christians who love the Bible equally have reached different conclusions, and the temperature of the debate has often been higher than the quality…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60018. Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is intense. It is odd. It made my cousin move to Wales. Used that loosely the word becomes a way of saying that I find a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60002. Darwinian evolution is the account of origins that most of us absorbed before we could evaluate it, in classrooms and documentaries and museum captions, and it arrives with the authority of settled fact rather than as a theory with a history and a set of assumptions. I want to do two things here….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60017. The question of whether the Qur’an proves the Bible reaches me from two directions at once, and the people asking it want opposite things. Some Muslims say that the Qur’an confirms the Torah and the Gospel, and that a Christian ought therefore to accept the Qur’an as the final word in the same…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60001. Nobody teaches most of us how to defend the faith. We learn to pray, we learn to find Habakkuk without the contents page, and then one day a colleague says something about the Bible being edited by emperors and we discover we have nothing to say. Scripture is not vague about this. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an expression of regret, whereas the Greek behind it means nothing of the sort. So let me clear the ground. Christian apologetics is the work of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60016. Whenever this question comes up, people are usually asking two different things at once, and it helps to separate them before deciding whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. One question is whether both faiths teach that there is only one God. The other is whether the God each describes is in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13013. The five solas are the shorthand history has given us for what the Reformers recovered about salvation. Sola is simply Latin for alone, and each one is a small word with a very large fence around it, because in every case the argument was about what else might be allowed to stand alongside….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60015. The New Age movement is not a church, a denomination, or an organisation you can join, and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to pin down. There is no headquarters, no founder, no membership roll and no creed. What there is instead is a mood, a set of instincts about the…