Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04031 Pentecost is one of the most significant events in the entire Bible, and yet it is often reduced to a story about strange languages and tongues of fire. What actually happened in that upper room in Jerusalem, and in the streets that followed, was nothing less than the birth of the New Testament…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04049 Few gifts have generated more controversy in the modern church than the gift of tongues. In some circles it is treated as the essential evidence that a person has received the Holy Spirit. In others it is dismissed entirely as a first-century phenomenon that ended with the apostolic age. Both positions, as this…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04047 When Paul writes that “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7), he is describing something that belongs to the entire church across all ages. Spiritual gifts are not occasional divine extras for particularly devout believers. They are the normal means by which the Spirit…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04048 The gift of prophecy is among the most discussed and most misunderstood gifts in the New Testament. Some believers treat every impression or sense of spiritual prompting as “a word from the Lord.” Others conclude that genuine prophecy ended with the apostolic age and that anyone claiming to prophesy today is at best…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 03016 The question of why Jesus had to rise is not the same as asking why the resurrection matters, though the two are closely related. To ask why He had to rise is to ask what would have been left incomplete, unresolved, or false had the tomb remained occupied. The answer is sobering: without…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60022 The claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is either the most important fact in human history or the most successful deception ever perpetrated. There is no middle ground. If it happened, it changes everything about what it means to be human, what death is, and who God is. If…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 13013 The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a theological invention but a recovery. When Luther posted his theses and Calvin worked through Geneva, what drove them was the conviction that Scripture’s teaching on salvation had been buried under layers of tradition, sacramentalism, and institutional authority. The Five Solas that emerged from…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02057 Molinism is a theological framework developed to explain how God can exercise complete providential control over history while human beings retain genuine freedom of choice. It has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades and deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment. It asks genuinely important questions, though the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02058 Middle knowledge — Latin scientia media — is the theological concept at the centre of Molinism. It refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually occur. Understanding it carefully is necessary before forming a view on whether it is…