Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60045. Woke ideology is a term that generates more heat than light, partly because almost nobody who is called woke uses the word about themselves, and partly because it has become a general purpose insult for anything the speaker dislikes. So let me define what I mean before I go a step further, because…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60012. Islam and Christianity share a great deal of vocabulary and disagree about almost everything that vocabulary refers to. Both speak of one God, of prophets, of revelation, of Jesus, of judgement, and the overlap makes the differences harder to see rather than easier. I want to describe what Muslims actually believe, accurately enough…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 60042. The Western Wall stands in Jerusalem today, some fifty courses of ancient stone, and every year millions of people place prayers into its cracks. Sceptics point at it and ask a reasonable question. Jesus said that not one stone would be left upon another, so how is that wall still there? Either the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60011. Christians often assume that modern Judaism is simply the religion of the Old Testament carried forward, and that a Jewish neighbour today believes roughly what Moses believed with a longer beard. It is a natural assumption and it is not accurate. The faith practised in synagogues today took its present shape after the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60044. Intersectionality theory began life as a technical term in American legal scholarship and has since become a whole way of seeing the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 to describe a real problem: a black woman suing for discrimination could find that the courts recognised race claims and sex claims but had…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60025. Modern political thinking has almost no category for national sin. Nations are treated as power structures, economies, or administrative units, and the idea that a country as a country might be morally accountable to God sounds to most ears like something left over from an older world. Scripture takes an entirely different view,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60041. Theological progressivism is not a denomination and does not have a headquarters, which is part of what makes it difficult to discuss. It is better understood as a method, a way of handling Scripture and doctrine which assumes that the church is on a journey away from its past and towards a fuller…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60024. The New Testament assumes that false teachers will come. Jesus warned about them, Paul warned the Ephesian elders that they would arise from among their own number, and Peter, John and Jude each devote substantial space to the problem. The question is never whether they exist. It is how ordinary believers, without a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60008. Asking what makes Christianity unique invites a certain kind of answer, the sort that lists our advantages and sounds rather pleased with itself. I want to avoid that, because the things that actually set the gospel apart are not achievements we can be smug about. Every one of them is something done to…