Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version of Jesus that these texts supposedly preserve. It is a compelling story, and I understand why it sells books. It is also, on the actual…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1036. Creeds and confessions are summaries, not sources. That single sentence answers most of the confusion I encounter around this question. A creed does not add to what Scripture has revealed, and it does not carry authority independent of Scripture. What it does is state, in careful and tested language, what a body of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4163. The Latter Rain movement was a revival that broke out in 1948 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and although it was formally disowned by the main Pentecostal denominations within a few years, its ideas have proved remarkably durable and lie behind a great deal of what we see in charismatic circles today. To understand…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and useful history. Long before the Reformation produced its famous catechisms, the believers of the first few centuries were carefully instructing new converts in the faith…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest Christians did not walk around with a leather-bound Bible containing all sixty-six books. The church was born at Pentecost, and the Gospels and letters were…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1182 If the Alexandrian school taught the early church to look beneath the words of Scripture for a hidden spiritual meaning, the school at Antioch taught it to honour the words themselves. The two traditions ran alongside each other for centuries, and the difference between them is not a dusty quarrel but a question…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181 Long before the Reformation settled the church on a literal and grammatical reading of Scripture, two great centres of learning pulled the early church in different directions. One sat in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in Antioch in Syria, and the way each handled the Bible shaped Christian interpretation for centuries. To understand…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11026 A pastor who stops reading is a pastor who stops growing, and a pastor who stops growing will eventually stop feeding his congregation well. The ministry demands constant study, reflection, and the sharpening that comes from engaging with minds greater than your own. What follows is not an exhaustive list but a carefully…