Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60095. Firmament is a word most people meet only in the King James Version of Genesis 1, and it has generated a surprising amount of argument. Critics of the biblical account claim it reveals a primitive cosmology in which the sky was a solid metal dome holding back an ocean, with the stars fixed…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60094. A global flood is what Genesis 6 to 9 appears to describe, and a great many Christians now hold instead that the deluge was a large regional inundation in Mesopotamia. This is not a question about ancient geography alone. What is at stake is how we read the text, how Jesus and Peter…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60090. Faith and reason are assumed by almost everybody to be opposites, and the assumption has done real damage to Christian witness. On one side stands the believer who parks his brain at the church door. On the other stands the clear eyed rationalist who has outgrown all that. It is a caricature, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60089. Objective truth has become the one claim you are not allowed to make in polite company. That may be true for you but not for me sounds tolerant and generous, and it is now the standard response to any statement about God, morality or the resurrection of Jesus. It has moved out of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60088. Science and Scripture are widely assumed to be locked in permanent conflict, and the assumption does a great deal of quiet damage. It shows up in newspapers, in lecture theatres, and in the private worries of Christians who feel caught between the faith they hold and the world the sciences appear to describe….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown’s novel, to have been assembled by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325, with inconvenient gospels burned and a divine Jesus voted into existence. It is a marvellous story….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that lecture theatre for the first time, it can feel as though the floor has tilted. Isaiah arrives as the work of two or three hands….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the prophet’s own personal insight rather than from the Holy Spirit carrying that prophet along. The question of whether you should trust your own reading of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with identical urgency. A broken finger and a heart attack both need attention, but not the same attention, and not on the same timescale. Theological triage…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something doctrinal is being quietly avoided along with the vocabulary. It is not. God’s absolute rule over creation, history, and every individual life is thoroughly biblical…