Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01200 Scripture is frequently quoted and frequently misunderstood, sometimes because a quotation has been removed from its context, sometimes because a popular rendering has hardened into assumed meaning that the original never carried, and sometimes because the verse is genuinely addressing a different situation from the one it is being applied to. The consequences…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5002 The Bible does not approach human sexuality and gender as peripheral matters of private preference or cultural convention. From the opening chapters of Genesis they are woven into the fabric of creation itself, part of what it means to be made in God’s image and to live as the creatures He designed. Understanding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5004 The question of masculinity has become genuinely contested in contemporary Western culture. From one direction comes the insistence that traditional masculine virtues are inherently problematic, expressions of privilege and domination that require deconstruction. From another, a reactive form of masculinity has emerged that confuses aggression, emotional closure, and domination with genuine strength. Neither…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05010 The way any community treats its most vulnerable members reveals something fundamental about its values. For the church, the question of how Christians should view and relate to people with disabilities is not a peripheral social concern; it goes to the heart of what the gospel says about human worth, the nature of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05042 The Bible’s early chapters record lifespans that strike modern readers as extraordinary: Methuselah lived 969 years, Adam 930, Noah 950. Within a few generations of the flood, those figures collapse dramatically until Moses writes in Psalm 90 about seventy or eighty years as the human allotment. This is not incidental data. It raises…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05045 Few theological questions about human nature have generated more sustained discussion than how many genuinely distinct elements make up a human person. The debate between dichotomy and trichotomy — between the view that human beings consist of two elements (body and soul/spirit) and the view that they consist of three (body, soul, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5026 Few questions excite and perplex people in equal measure as this one. What exactly will the resurrection body be? Will it be physical? Will it look the same? Will it be subject to the same limitations as the present body? Paul addresses the question head-on in 1 Corinthians 15, and his answer is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5028 The relationship between the body and the soul is one of the oldest questions in human thought, and one that Christianity answers very differently from the surrounding culture in almost every age. The ancient Greek world tended to regard the body as a prison, the soul as the real person temporarily trapped in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05020 Angels and human beings are both creatures made by God, and both appear throughout Scripture as conscious, personal beings who respond to him. But the differences between them go considerably deeper than the obvious observation that one is usually visible and the other is not. Understanding what sets human beings apart from angels…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4099 Acts 19:1-7 is one of those passages that regularly surfaces in discussions about the Holy Spirit, and it is often read through the lens of Pentecostal or charismatic theology as evidence that a believer can be genuinely saved yet still lack the Spirit. The question is worth pressing carefully: when Paul encountered these…