Biblical teaching on human nature—created in God’s image, fallen into sin, and redeemable through Christ.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60093. Cain’s wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air of having settled the matter. Cain kills Abel, is driven out, goes to the land of Nod, and there he knows his wife. Where, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13012. Noah’s nakedness is one of those passages people read quickly and hope nobody asks about. A righteous man plants a vineyard, gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, and his grandson ends up cursed. Even by the standards of Genesis it is an odd few verses. It has also attracted some of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12027 Whether sex is a biological reality or a social construct has moved from academic seminars to primary schools in about two decades, which is remarkably fast for an idea that reverses something humanity has assumed for all of recorded history. It is now treated in many settings as established fact, with dissent marked…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 11059. Psychology and Scripture is a subject that produces more heat than light in most Christian conversations, and I have watched believers land in two equally unhelpful ditches. On one side sits the Christian who treats every therapist as an enemy of the faith and every diagnosis as a failure of discipleship. On the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does not teach that human beings are as wicked as they could possibly be. It teaches that sin has reached every part of us, so that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 6074. Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam’s fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It is one of the few Christian doctrines that can be confirmed by reading a newspaper. The disagreements are not about whether something is wrong with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never said. It has been quoted to shut down every intuition, every emotion and every conviction a believer has ever had. That is not what the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 5007. Ask me when human life begins and I will not reach first for a laboratory or a law court. I will reach for the Bible, because the question of when human life begins is finally a question about what God says He is doing in the hidden place where none of us can…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 05045. Are soul and spirit two words for one thing, or two distinct parts of you? That is the heart of the long debate between dichotomy, the view that a human being consists of body plus one immaterial element, and trichotomy, the view that we are body, soul, and spirit as three genuinely distinct…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05044. The relationship between brain and soul becomes intensely practical the day someone you love starts to disappear behind dementia, a stroke, or a brain injury. The face is familiar, the body is present, and yet memory, personality, and recognition seem to be draining away. What is actually happening to the person? Is the…