Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7103 Whether Jesus is the only way to God is the question that makes Christians most uncomfortable in polite company, and it is the one the New Testament answers most bluntly. Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6)….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7102 When Jesus said that the Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many, He was using a word His hearers understood immediately and we mostly do not. A ransom for many is not sentimental language about a life given up in a good cause. It named a specific commercial…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7101 Propitiation and expiation are two words that most Christians have met in a hymn and few could define. They are not interchangeable, and the difference between them was the subject of one of the sharpest translation debates of the twentieth century. It matters, because what is at stake is whether the cross deals…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7100 The theories of atonement are the church’s various attempts to answer one question: what exactly happened when Jesus died? Everybody agrees that the cross saves. The disagreement is about the mechanism, and two thousand years of reflection have produced several distinct accounts, some complementary and some genuinely at odds. My conviction is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7099 The question of why Jesus died rather than God simply issuing a pardon is one of the most honest questions anyone can ask, and it is usually asked with real feeling. If God is almighty and loving, why the blood? Why not one merciful word from the throne and the whole matter closed?…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7098 Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that Jesus died in the place of sinners, bearing what they deserved so that they need not bear it themselves. Add the word penal and you have the full claim: what He bore was not suffering only but penalty, the judicial consequence of sin under a righteous God….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7097 The atonement of Christ is the centre of the Christian faith, and the word itself is one of the few great theological terms that began life in English. William Tyndale coined it in the sixteenth century to render the idea of at-one-ment, the making of one out of two who were estranged. It…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7096 The Calvinist system is the most influential account of salvation in English-speaking evangelicalism, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately by both its friends and its critics. If we are going to disagree with it, and I do, then we owe it an accurate description first. Caricature is cheap and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7095 Freedom from shame is one of the least advertised benefits of the doctrine of justification, and for many believers it is the one they need most. Guilt and shame are not the same thing, and a gospel presentation that deals only with guilt will leave a great many Christians still bowed under something…