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Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an expression of regret, whereas the Greek behind it means nothing of the sort. So let me clear the ground. Christian apologetics is the work of…
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 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated church, which means an assembly, a gathering of those called out. That is a more useful starting point than most people expect, because it means…
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…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul’s own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for the last time, warning them that his conscience was clear precisely because he had held nothing back. He had not softened the hard parts, skipped…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one view among equally valid others rather than a claim that could actually be true or false. This pressure seeps into the church too, so that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology asks what Scripture actually teaches, gathering everything the Bible says about God, salvation, and the Christian life into a coherent, carefully reasoned account. Apologetics asks…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that Jesus taught largely through simple stories about farmers, fishermen, and lost sheep. It is a completely reasonable frustration, and I do not want to wave…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed on Scripture from the outside. It is a completely fair suspicion to raise. Scripture itself was not written as a theology textbook with neat chapter…