Historical Theology

Question 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I ...

Question 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and ...

Question 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently ...

Question 12029 The transgender movement seemed to arrive suddenly, and that impression is part of why it has been so disorienting. One decade the subject was almost unknown outside specialist ...

Question 09004 Infant baptism, or paedobaptism, is practised by the majority of the world's Christians, including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and many Methodists. Given its prevalence, it ...

Question 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, ...

Question 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the ...

Question 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts ...

Question 13004. The Protestant Reformation is one of those events everybody has heard of and very few of us could actually describe. Mention it at a church coffee morning and ...

Question 13005. The five points of Calvinism are usually met for the first time as an acrostic, TULIP, and I have watched more than one young believer fall in love ...

Question 13008. Church history has a reputation problem. It sounds like the sort of thing you take up once the children have left home and you have run out of ...

Question 13002 Martin Luther is one of the most consequential figures in the history of Christianity. His challenge to the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century ignited the ...

Question 13003. John Calvin was a French lawyer turned theologian who became the most systematic mind of the Reformation and gave his name to a movement he would probably have ...

Question 13001. The Protestant Reformation was the sixteenth-century movement that recovered the gospel of justification by faith and, in the process, broke Western Christendom apart. That sentence contains both the ...

Question 13000. The Church Fathers are the Christian writers of roughly the first five centuries whose works have survived, and for a lot of Baptists they occupy a strange middle ...

Question 1118. The silent years sit between Malachi, the last prophetic voice of the Old Testament, and the opening pages of Matthew, roughly four centuries in which the Bible itself ...

Question 10115. The doctrine of purgatory teaches that those who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins, or with temporal punishment still owing, undergo a purifying ...

Question 12045. Defending religious liberty while believing that idolatry is a sin against God feels, to a lot of people, like holding two contradictory positions at once. I get asked ...

Question 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis ...

Question 60083. Bultmann's demythologisation is one of those pieces of academic vocabulary that sounds harmless and turns out to be anything but. Rudolf Bultmann, who lived from 1884 to 1976 ...

Question 13013. The five solas are the shorthand history has given us for what the Reformers recovered about salvation. Sola is simply Latin for alone, and each one is a ...

Question 2077. The death of Uzzah is one of those Old Testament episodes that stops readers cold: a man reaches out to steady the ark of the covenant when the ...

Question 13012. Noah's nakedness is one of those passages people read quickly and hope nobody asks about. A righteous man plants a vineyard, gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, ...

Question 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New ...

Question 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to ...

Question 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those ...

Question 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in ...

Question 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can ...

Question 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from ...

Question 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and ...

Question 13002 Today, October 31st, marks Reformation Day. So who was Martin Luther? Luther was a German monk, tormented by his sin, desperately trying to earn salvation through religious practices ...