Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1143. Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is one of those questions that sounds academic until you realise how much rests on it. If Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and instead a handful of anonymous editors stitched it together centuries later from borrowed sources, then every place where Jesus,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1142. General revelation is God’s self disclosure through the created order, through history, and through the human conscience, available in principle to every person who has ever lived, whether or not they have ever held a Bible in their hands. From the intricacy of a single living cell to the voice of conscience that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the Book of Mormon, to name only the most obvious examples of the many holy books competing for allegiance around the world today. So what makes…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty seat of someone who used to sit near you on a Sunday. Social media is full of stories of people, often raised in evangelical homes,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe the four winds are held by four literal angels at the four literal corners of a flat earth. I do not believe that, and neither…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about. “Post-truth” was named the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year back in 2016, describing a climate where appeals to emotion and personal conviction carry…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1129. Biblical literalism gets blamed for a great deal it never actually claimed, and nowhere is the confusion thicker than in the running argument between Scripture and science. People assume that if I hold to biblical literalism I must also believe the sun is a lamp fixed to a solid dome, because that is…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern sensibilities, and the honest question worth asking is why a God who wanted to communicate clearly would give us a book containing so much that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1099. Gender ideology is one of the most pastorally sensitive subjects I address, because behind every abstract question sits a real person, often someone genuinely struggling, sometimes a parent frightened for a child, sometimes a young person in real distress. I want to answer carefully and with compassion, because Scripture never lets truth and…