Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60107 Theodicy is not a word most people encounter outside of theology or philosophy, yet it names one of the most pressing questions anyone can ask: how can a God who is both all-powerful and perfectly good allow evil and suffering to exist? The word comes from the Greek theos (God) and dike (justice),…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60108 The question is a classic philosophical puzzle, usually deployed as a challenge to the coherence of believing in God at all. It runs like this: if God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He can create it, then there is something He cannot do…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60022 The claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is either the most important fact in human history or the most successful deception ever perpetrated. There is no middle ground. If it happened, it changes everything about what it means to be human, what death is, and who God is. If…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3064 The traditional answer is Friday, which is why we call it “Good Friday.” But some have challenged this, arguing for Wednesday or Thursday instead. The debate centres on how we understand Jesus’ statement that He would be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Let us examine…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02057 Molinism is a theological framework developed to explain how God can exercise complete providential control over history while human beings retain genuine freedom of choice. It has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades and deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment. It asks genuinely important questions, though the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02058 Middle knowledge — Latin scientia media — is the theological concept at the centre of Molinism. It refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually occur. Understanding it carefully is necessary before forming a view on whether it is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2065 Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom existed but evil never entered? The question is one of the most serious in all of theology, and it deserves more than a quick answer. It touches on the nature of freedom itself, on why God chose to create at all, and on…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2075 Of all the objections raised against the God of the Bible, this one carries perhaps the most emotional force. The conquest of Canaan, in which God commanded Israel to destroy entire populations, is regularly cited as evidence that the God of the Old Testament is a deity of tribal violence rather than the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60093 This question has been posed as a sceptical challenge to the historical reliability of Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, when Archbishop James Ussher was reportedly confronted with it. It assumes that the Genesis narrative has left itself an unanswerable problem, and that the only honest response is to admit the story…