Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 05045. Are soul and spirit two names for the same part of you, or two different parts? That is the heart of a long debate between dichotomy, the view that a human being consists of a body and one immaterial element, and trichotomy, the view that we are body, soul and spirit as three…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 5100. The intermediate state is the condition of a human being between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body. It is one of those doctrines that hardly anyone can name and almost everyone has opinions about, usually absorbed from hymns, films and funerals rather than from Scripture. It matters more than…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5082. The phrase spiritual body has caused more confusion than almost any other in Paul, because English readers hear the word spiritual and think non-physical. That is precisely what Paul does not mean. If he had meant non-physical he would not have used the word body, and the entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5152. The Christian view of death is stranger than most people assume, because it refuses both of the positions on offer in our culture. It will not say that death is natural and fine, and it will not say that death is the end. It calls death an enemy, and then says the enemy…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5159. Bodily redemption is the hope Paul is straining towards in Romans 8:23, and I think it is one of the most neglected promises in the whole of Christian teaching. We speak a great deal about the saving of the soul. We say far less about what God intends to do with the ageing,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 5174. Will you be the same person at the resurrection, or someone new wearing your name? It sounds like a philosopher’s question until you have stood at a graveside, and then it becomes the only question that matters. People do not ask whether their mother will exist in some general sense. They ask whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5199. The final destiny of the human person is one of those questions that people think they have already answered until you press them on it. Ask a congregation where they are going and most will say heaven. Ask what they will be doing there and the answers thin out considerably. Ask whether they…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60093. Cain’s wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air of having settled the matter. Cain kills Abel, is driven out, goes to the land of Nod, and there he knows his wife. Where, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12027 Whether sex is a biological reality or a social construct has moved from academic seminars to primary schools in about two decades, which is remarkably fast for an idea that reverses something humanity has assumed for all of recorded history. It is now treated in many settings as established fact, with dissent marked…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12019 Transgender identity is not really a question about pronouns, bathrooms or sport, though those are where the arguments usually happen. It is a question about what a human being is, and whether the body has anything authoritative to say about that. Everything else follows from the answer. I want to handle this at…