Defending the Christian faith—evidence for God’s existence, reliability of Scripture, and answering objections.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60108 The question is a classic philosophical puzzle, usually deployed as a challenge to the coherence of believing in God at all. It runs like this: if God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He can create it, then there is something He cannot do…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04114 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, announces dramatic healings, and encourages large financial donations as an act of faith. Millions of people watch these programmes. Some are ill and desperately hopeful….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60104 Twice in the opening chapters of Revelation, Jesus singles out a group called the Nicolaitans — once commending the church at Ephesus for hating their deeds (Revelation 2:6), and once rebuking the church at Pergamum for tolerating their teaching (Revelation 2:15). The fact that Jesus mentions them by name, and that He hates…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60022 The claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is either the most important fact in human history or the most successful deception ever perpetrated. There is no middle ground. If it happened, it changes everything about what it means to be human, what death is, and who God is. If…
Reading Time: 13 minutesQuestion 12045 Baptists hold a remarkable and often underappreciated distinction in the history of Western civilisation: they were among the earliest voices in the English-speaking world to call for universal religious freedom. Not mere toleration for their own group, but genuine liberty of conscience for all people, including those whose beliefs they considered deeply wrong….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02057 Molinism is a theological framework developed to explain how God can exercise complete providential control over history while human beings retain genuine freedom of choice. It has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades and deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment. It asks genuinely important questions, though the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02058 Middle knowledge — Latin scientia media — is the theological concept at the centre of Molinism. It refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually occur. Understanding it carefully is necessary before forming a view on whether it is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2079 The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is one of the most theologically contested passages in the Old Testament, and it has been pressed into service in support of Calvinist determinism for centuries. If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, was Pharaoh responsible for resisting? Did God create Pharaoh as a vessel for destruction and then hold…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2075 Of all the objections raised against the God of the Bible, this one carries perhaps the most emotional force. The conquest of Canaan, in which God commanded Israel to destroy entire populations, is regularly cited as evidence that the God of the Old Testament is a deity of tribal violence rather than the…