Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09042. Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and you will usually get something about icons and beards. Ask an Orthodox believer what Baptists believe and you may get something equally thin. Since a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09020. Episcopal government is the system in which authority in the church rests with bishops, who oversee groups of congregations and stand in a distinct order above the local minister. The word comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning overseer. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, Methodists in many places and several Pentecostal bodies all…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a genuinely different job. A creed states the bare essentials of the faith in the fewest possible words. A confession expands considerably on that core, addressing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays out with striking clarity: what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10148. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are among the most searching pages in the New Testament, and also among the most misused. Some readers treat them as a coded map of church history. Others skip them entirely in their hurry to reach the trumpets and bowls. Both approaches miss what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10147. Who wrote the book of Revelation is not a question for specialists only, because the authority of the last book in our Bible is bound up with the answer. If the apostle John wrote it, then we are reading the final word of the last surviving member of the Twelve. If somebody else…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10138. The historicist view reads Revelation as a continuous panorama of church history, unrolling from the apostle’s own day through to the return of Jesus, with each seal, trumpet and bowl corresponding to a particular event or era along the way. For several centuries it was the standard Protestant reading, and today it has…