Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7085 The question arises naturally for anyone who takes the New Testament seriously. Paul can write to the Corinthians and call them “those sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and yet the same letter spends considerable energy addressing a congregation with serious moral and relational problems. If they are already sanctified, what is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07073 One of the most liberating and yet most misunderstood aspects of the Christian life involves the relationship between who the believer already is in Christ and who they are still becoming in daily experience. The New Testament holds these two realities in constant and deliberate tension, and failing to distinguish them produces either…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07074 The question of whether a Christian can reach a state of sinless perfection in this life has been debated with considerable energy across church history, and it continues to be a live issue in certain theological traditions. The claim is made with evident sincerity and spiritual earnestness, which is part of what makes…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7068 The Free Grace movement is a strand of evangelical theology arguing that saving faith consists simply in believing God’s promise of eternal life to the one who trusts in Christ, with repentance, commitment to discipleship, and acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship all understood as belonging to sanctification rather than to justification. It is not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7069 The question of salvation divided Western Christianity in the sixteenth century and has not been formally resolved since. The Protestant Reformation turned fundamentally on the question of how a person is justified before God, and the Council of Trent, convened by Rome between 1545 and 1563, responded by issuing specific condemnations of the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60082 The Word of Faith movement is one of the most widely diffused streams of popular Christianity in the world today, with roots in mid-twentieth century America and branches now extending across every continent. Its central teachings about health, wealth, confession, and the power of spoken faith are encountered across television networks, megachurches, and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7086 The term “scapegoat” has passed so thoroughly into ordinary language, used to describe anyone blamed for things they did not do, that its biblical origins can become obscured. The original scapegoat appears in Leviticus 16, as part of the Day of Atonement ritual, and it provides one of the most vivid pictures in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3013 1 John 2:1 is one of those verses that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological in the same breath: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2018 Few theological questions carry more emotional weight. Behind the abstract formulation often lies something very personal: a parent who died without faith, a sibling who walked away from the church, a friend who never responded to the gospel no matter how many conversations took place. The question asks why an all-loving God would…