Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will bless capitalism or socialism outright, and it stubbornly refuses to do either. What it does give us is a set of convictions about property, work,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12060. Borrowing money is not always wrong, and the short answer to this question is no, though borrowing money carries warnings in Scripture that most Christians in Britain have never heard preached. We live in a country built on credit, and a teaching that never examines it has quietly surrendered a large part of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12059. Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture warriors. They are usually someone whose brother, colleague or oldest friend has sent an invitation, and who loves that person and does not want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12058. Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation arrives with a great deal of embarrassment attached on both sides. I want to answer the doctrinal question honestly and then spend most of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12057. Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever been told. What I want to do is show you why Scripture says it, because a rule without a reason will not survive a single…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12056. Physical discipline is the part of this question that gets argued about, though behind it sits a whole theology of children, of authority and of correction. I want to deal with the wider matter first, because most of the heat here comes from people talking past each other. I should also say at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12055. A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for the community receiving him. Most public argument picks one and treats the other as evidence of bad faith. I am not going to tell you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12054. Family planning is one of the few subjects where Christians hold strong private convictions and say almost nothing publicly, which means couples often work it out alone, with no biblical teaching at all and a good deal of unspoken guilt. I want to change that a little. Not by handing down a rule…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12050. Ask a room of British evangelicals about climate change and you will get two confident answers and a lot of silence in between. One group treats it as the defining moral emergency of our time. Another treats the whole subject as a political trap dressed up in science. I think both are answering…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12049. Is smoking a sin? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just come to faith and is quietly terrified that the answer is yes and that they will fail. That pastoral setting shapes everything I am about to say. The honest answer is that Scripture…