Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60006. The problem of evil is the objection I take most seriously, and the one I am slowest to answer quickly. It is the argument that if God is entirely good and entirely powerful, then the suffering in this world should not exist, and since it plainly does, one of those attributes has to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7100 The theories of atonement are the church’s various attempts to answer one question: what exactly happened when Jesus died? Everybody agrees that the cross saves. The disagreement is about the mechanism, and two thousand years of reflection have produced several distinct accounts, some complementary and some genuinely at odds. My conviction is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7099 The question of why Jesus died rather than God simply issuing a pardon is one of the most honest questions anyone can ask, and it is usually asked with real feeling. If God is almighty and loving, why the blood? Why not one merciful word from the throne and the whole matter closed?…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7098 Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that Jesus died in the place of sinners, bearing what they deserved so that they need not bear it themselves. Add the word penal and you have the full claim: what He bore was not suffering only but penalty, the judicial consequence of sin under a righteous God….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7097 The atonement of Christ is the centre of the Christian faith, and the word itself is one of the few great theological terms that began life in English. William Tyndale coined it in the sixteenth century to render the idea of at-one-ment, the making of one out of two who were estranged. It…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7043. Unlimited atonement is my answer to the oldest question in this discussion: for whom did Jesus die? Did He die for every human being who has ever lived, or only for those who would finally believe? The question sounds abstract until you are sitting with a dying man who wants to know whether…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07039. Limited atonement, also called particular redemption or definite atonement, is the third point of the Calvinist system and the one that causes most trouble even inside Calvinism itself. It teaches that Jesus did not die for every human being, but died specifically and efficaciously for the elect, so that the cross actually secured…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3038. The crucifixion of Jesus raises a question most of us have never stopped to ask: why that particular death? If the Son of God had to die for sinners, He could in principle have been stoned like Stephen, beheaded like James, or killed in a hundred quieter ways. Instead, the eternal plan of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this is a single word, tetelestai (τετέλεσται), and it is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire New Testament. Far from being a…