Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60101. The moral argument starts with something so ordinary that it is easy to walk past. Human beings make moral judgements and expect them to carry real weight. When we say that torturing a child for entertainment is wrong, we do not mean that we personally dislike it, or that our society happens to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12059. Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture warriors. They are usually someone whose brother, colleague or oldest friend has sent an invitation, and who loves that person and does not want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12049. Is smoking a sin? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just come to faith and is quietly terrified that the answer is yes and that they will fail. That pastoral setting shapes everything I am about to say. The honest answer is that Scripture…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12036. Every discussion about Christian entertainment eventually arrives at the same awkward moment, when someone asks whether a particular film, box set or video game is acceptable and everyone in the room quietly hopes the answer will land on their side of the line. I have been in that room many times. I have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12004 Christians and tattoos is a subject that produces a good deal of confident assertion and rather little careful reading. One verse gets quoted, the conversation stops, and a young believer with a cross on his forearm is left feeling that he has done something shameful. I think we can do better than that….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12003 Few subjects generate more heat and less light among British believers than Christians and alcohol. Some congregations treat total abstinence as a settled biblical command. Others treat drinking as so unremarkable that they never mention it at all. Both are avoiding what Scripture actually says, which is more careful than either position and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12001 Most moral decisions a Christian faces are not the dramatic ones. They are whether to say something about a colleague’s expenses claim, whether the tax return is entirely honest, whether to take the job that pays more and will swallow your Sundays. Nobody writes books about those small choices, and they are where…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12000 Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make this year falls under it. What you do with your money, how you speak about an absent colleague, what you accept at work, how you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many things plainly, and then leaves us with hundreds of daily decisions it never mentions: this job, that programme, this investment, that friendship, this way of…