Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60073. The Turning revival began in Reading in 2016 and for a while it was the most talked about thing in British evangelicalism. Reports of hundreds and then thousands of people praying to receive Jesus on the streets travelled quickly, and churches across the country wanted to know how to get it. I want…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60092. Slavery in Scripture is raised more often as an accusation than as a question, and I understand why. The charge is that the Bible not only tolerates slavery but endorses it, and that the transatlantic trade was therefore consistent with Christian teaching. If that were true it would be a very serious matter…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60109. Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would have been recognised in 1930s Germany, and a great deal of it circulating among people who would be appalled to be called racist. So it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60072. The Latter Rain movement began in a small Canadian town in 1948 and has shaped far more of modern charismatic Christianity than most of its heirs realise. Its ideas are still with us, usually without the label attached. I write as a continuationist. I believe the gifts of the Spirit remain, and I…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60091. The Canaanite conquest is the passage in the Old Testament I am asked about more than any other, and it deserves better than the two standard responses. One is to explain it away until nothing troubling remains. The other is to shrug and say God can do what He likes. Neither is honest,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60108. Reincarnation is now believed by a surprising number of people in this country, including a fair few who would describe themselves as Christians. Surveys have repeatedly put the figure at around a quarter of the British population, which means it is not a fringe idea any more but a background assumption. So the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60071. Christian Zionism has become a term of abuse in a good deal of Christian writing, used to describe a caricature that almost nobody actually holds. Before I defend anything I want to say clearly what I do and do not mean by it. What I hold is that God made unconditional promises to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60090. Faith and reason are assumed by almost everybody to be opposites, and the assumption has done real damage to Christian witness. On one side stands the believer who parks his brain at the church door. On the other stands the clear eyed rationalist who has outgrown all that. It is a caricature, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60107. Theodicy is the technical name for the attempt to defend the goodness and power of God in a world that contains suffering. The word was coined by Gottfried Leibniz in 1710, from the Greek theos and dike, God and justice, and it means something like the justification of God. That phrase should make…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60070. Whether there is religious freedom in Islamic lands is a question that invites two bad answers. One says no, never, anywhere, which is inaccurate. The other says the situation is much like anywhere else, which is worse than inaccurate because it makes light of real suffering. I want to give you the picture…