Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60034. Few phrases generate more heat in a Christian conversation than systemic racism, and a good deal of that heat comes from people arguing past one another because they are using the words differently. Before anyone can agree or disagree, it is worth being clear about what is actually being claimed. At its simplest…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60052. String theory comes up in church conversations more often than you might expect, usually because somebody has watched a documentary and wants to know whether it undermines Genesis. It is a proposal in theoretical physics which suggests that the fundamental constituents of matter are not point particles but tiny vibrating filaments, and that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60033. Whether a Christian should be using AI is now a live question in ordinary church life rather than a theoretical one. Students are using it for essays, employers are requiring it, and preachers are quietly wondering whether the sermon outline that appeared in thirty seconds counts as their own work. The unease is…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60051. Are Islam and Christianity compatible? The question is asked in several different senses, and a great deal of confusion comes from answering one sense while the questioner meant another. Sometimes it means whether Muslims and Christians can live peaceably as neighbours, which is a social question. Sometimes it means whether the two faiths…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60032. Artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into daily life at a speed that has caught most institutions unprepared, the church very much included. Systems that write, summarise, translate, generate pictures and hold a conversation are now in the hands of anyone with a phone, and the question of whether…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits are released. It goes by several names. Word of Faith. Health and wealth. Name it and claim it. Positive confession. The labels differ and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60031. Creation care is one of those subjects where Christians tend to react rather than think, and the reactions come in two flavours. Some believers absorb the environmental movement wholesale and end up with a faith in which recycling has become a sacrament. Others dismiss the whole field as a left wing preoccupation for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60049. Primal heresy is the name I give to the oldest lie ever told, the one that arrived in a garden and has been repackaged in every generation since. It has four parts, and if you learn them you will recognise them everywhere, which is both useful and rather depressing. The serpent questioned God’s…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 60030. Racism is one of the oldest and most persistent evils in human history, and Scripture gives us the tools to name it for what it is. Before we get to any modern argument about terminology or policy, there is a straightforward biblical account of why treating people as lesser on the basis of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60029. Every so often someone tells me that the historical Jesus never existed, that He was invented by the early church out of older myths, and that the whole thing is a construction. It circulates online, appears in popular books, and lands in the inbox of Christian students at university with an air of…