Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves anything other than mainstream evangelical Christians. This surprises people who assume the Trinity is one settled doctrine with no internal variety at all. It is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1084. Biblical genealogies can seem tedious to modern readers, long lists of unpronounceable names we are tempted to skip on our way to the next narrative section. Yet these genealogies serve real theological and legal purposes in Scripture, and they have been the subject of long-running debate regarding their completeness and their historical accuracy….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1041. Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not a modern invention layered onto the text from outside. It is the reading strategy Jesus Himself modelled and explicitly commanded, and taking it seriously changes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2109. A Christophany is an appearance of the Son of God before His incarnation – the eternal Christ showing Himself to people in the Old Testament, centuries before Bethlehem. The word is built like its cousin “theophany”: Christos, “Christ”, plus phaino, “to appear”. Where a theophany is any visible appearing of God, a Christophany…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4155. This is one of the genuinely puzzling sayings of Jesus, and blasphemy against the Spirit seems at first to be ranked as worse than blasphemy against the Son himself. ‘Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven’ (Matthew…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04034. Follow the Gospels closely and you cannot miss how often the Spirit and Jesus appear side by side. From the announcement of his conception to the power of his rising, the Holy Spirit is present at every hinge of the Lord’s earthly life. This is not a minor thread running quietly in the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 03047 To say that Jesus is our High Priest is to say that He is the one who represents us before God and brings God to us, the mediator who deals with our sin and keeps us in fellowship with the Father. The title High Priest runs all through the letter to the Hebrews,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10158 Typology is one of the most important interpretive tools for understanding how the Old and New Testaments relate to one another. It is the recognition that God embedded patterns, persons, events, and institutions within the earlier stages of redemptive history that foreshadow and anticipate what He would later accomplish in Christ and in…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09066 Consubstantiation is the term commonly used to describe the Lutheran view of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. It represents a middle position between the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the memorial view held by Baptists and many evangelicals, and understanding it helps clarify both what Lutherans believe and why the memorial…