Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7087. The Five Solas are the five Latin slogans that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and to the glory of God alone. Every one of them is a statement of exclusion, which is the point of the word sola, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7086. The scapegoat theory of atonement is a way of understanding the cross that draws on the ritual of Leviticus 16 and, in its modern form, on sociological accounts of how communities discharge their violence onto a chosen victim. It has become influential in academic theology over the last fifty years, and it contains…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who has just grasped the doctrine of positional sanctification for the first time. If my standing cannot improve, what exactly is the effort for? The New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7084. Whether the worst sinners imaginable could be forgiven is a question people ask in two very different tones of voice, and the tone matters. Some ask it as a challenge, expecting Christianity to flinch. Others ask it because of somebody in their own family, and they need to know whether there is a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7083. Old Testament believers were saved in exactly the same way we are, by grace through faith, and it is worth saying that plainly at the outset because a good deal of confusion surrounds this question. Some assume they were saved by keeping the law, which would make the Old Testament a different religion…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7081. Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument and a great deal of pastoral wreckage. I want to suggest instead that they are two instruments with different jobs, given by the same God,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7080. The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will hear permission to sin. Say that Christians are bound by it and you have contradicted Paul on almost every page of Galatians. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says that with his stripes we are healed, Peter quotes it, and the conclusion drawn is that sickness in a believer indicates either unconfessed sin or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin. In ordinary speech we believe things we are fairly confident about and nothing follows from it. I believe the train leaves at ten past. That…