Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must be studied at all, because the Spirit is not a topic that can be understood correctly in isolation from who He is as the third…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1035. Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has read, defended, and lived out Scripture across two thousand years. The question is not whether tradition matters. It plainly does. The question is which one…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of guidance a Christian ever consults, as though reason, experience, and the accumulated wisdom of other believers count for nothing. That is not the claim, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest from the very outset that faithful, Bible-believing Christians have read this book in several quite different ways across church history. I hold a futurist, literal-grammatical-historical…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked inside 1 Corinthians 13:10, and I want to examine that phrase carefully rather than simply asserting a conclusion and moving on. Paul writes that when…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and statesmen, is one of the most striking evidences for Scripture’s divine origin that I know, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves in ordinary…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices, and the New Testament says Jesus has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4056. Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion, and in some quarters more dangerous claims, than whether apostles and prophets still function today with the same authority they carried in the first century. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its confident assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to…