Defending the Christian faith—evidence for God’s existence, reliability of Scripture, and answering objections.
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern sensibilities, and the honest question worth asking is why a God who wanted to communicate clearly would give us a book containing so much that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1099. Gender ideology is one of the most pastorally sensitive subjects I address, because behind every abstract question sits a real person, often someone genuinely struggling, sometimes a parent frightened for a child, sometimes a young person in real distress. I want to answer carefully and with compassion, because Scripture never lets truth and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1098. Critical race theory has become one of the most contested phrases in public conversation, and church members ask me about it often enough that I want to address it directly rather than duck the question because it feels politically charged. Critical race theory is an academic framework, originating in legal scholarship in the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments online but so we can guard the actual meaning of the text we love. What I mean by the phrase is a pattern of reading…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1083. Scientific errors are what critics claim to find scattered through the Bible, arguing that Scripture reflects the primitive cosmology of ancient peoples and cannot be trusted as God’s Word on anything else either. They point to passages about the sun standing still, a solid dome over the earth, or the earth resting on…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1082. Biblical archaeology has quietly become one of the most persuasive answers I can give a sceptical friend, because it deals in something they cannot simply wave away: dirt, pottery, inscriptions, and dated strata pulled directly out of the ground. For centuries critics dismissed much of the Bible as myth and legend, claiming that…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ from each other in the details each writer chooses to include or leave out. Read the feeding of the five thousand in all three Gospels…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around…