Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2071 “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). These words, spoken by Jesus on the night of his arrest, have been among the most contested in Christian theology. Arians used them to argue that Jesus is a lesser being than the Father. Others have suggested they refer only to Jesus’ incarnate condition and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60082 The Word of Faith movement is one of the most widely diffused streams of popular Christianity in the world today, with roots in mid-twentieth century America and branches now extending across every continent. Its central teachings about health, wealth, confession, and the power of spoken faith are encountered across television networks, megachurches, and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 03087 The book of Ruth is four chapters long and tells a story set during the period of the judges. It could be read simply as a moving account of loyalty, loss, and redemption within an Israelite family. But the genealogy at its close, tracing a line from Perez through Boaz to David (Ruth…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3013 1 John 2:1 is one of those verses that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological in the same breath: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2013 The phrase ‘eternal generation of the Son’ appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a legitimate question: is this a doctrine the church developed to explain what Scripture teaches, or is it an addition that goes beyond what Scripture says? The answer matters, because the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2015 Theology has a way of making apparently abstract questions surprisingly practical, and this is one of them. The question is whether the pattern we observe in salvation – the Father planning, the Son dying, the Spirit applying – tells us something permanently true about who God is, or whether these were roles adopted…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2019 The doctrine of divine impassibility holds that God cannot be affected by anything external to Himself, that He does not suffer or experience pain, and that nothing in creation can move Him emotionally. It has a long and serious history in Christian theology, but it stands in considerable tension with how the Bible…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2028 The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian teaching that the one God eternally exists as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each person is fully and completely God, not a partial expression or a proportion of the divine being. There are not three gods and not one person manifesting in…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02030 James 1:13 states it plainly: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” That sounds straightforward enough. Yet the same New Testament that gives us that verse also tells us that Jesus was tempted…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3058 The Gospels tell us about Jesus’ birth, his presentation at the Temple, the visit of the Magi, the flight to Egypt, and his family’s return to Nazareth. Then there is silence. Luke alone records a brief glimpse of Jesus at age twelve in the Temple. After that, nothing until his baptism at around…