Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7083. Old Testament believers were saved in exactly the same way we are, by grace through faith, and it is worth saying that plainly at the outset because a good deal of confusion surrounds this question. Some assume they were saved by keeping the law, which would make the Old Testament a different religion…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7081. Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument and a great deal of pastoral wreckage. I want to suggest instead that they are two instruments with different jobs, given by the same God,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7080. The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will hear permission to sin. Say that Christians are bound by it and you have contradicted Paul on almost every page of Galatians. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07053 The elementary doctrines of Christ are listed in Hebrews 6:1-3, and the passage has puzzled readers for a long time. The writer tells his readers to leave these teachings behind and press on to maturity, which sounds alarmingly like an instruction to move beyond the basics of the faith. That cannot be what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07037. The phrase eternal covenant appears at several points in Scripture, and the question it raises is a fair one: what makes a covenant eternal, and which covenant is being spoken of? The answer matters more than it might first appear, because covenants are the framework on which the whole storyline of the Bible…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature of salvation, into a single coherent, logically arranged treatment. It asks, what does the whole of Scripture teach about this particular subject, drawing together texts…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10162. Modern Israel is the one nation on earth whose reappearance on the map sends people back to their Bibles, and 14 May 1948 is the date that did it. I have lost count of the conversations that begin with someone asking whether that afternoon in Tel Aviv was the fulfilment of prophecy, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10144. Inaugurated eschatology is the most widely held framework in evangelical scholarship today, and if you have read almost any modern commentary on the Gospels you have met it whether the phrase was used or not. It holds that the kingdom of God has genuinely begun with the coming of Jesus, yet awaits its…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10143. Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10142. Is God’s kingdom something I am living in now, or something I am waiting for? I get asked that more often than you might think, usually by someone who has been reading one author who insists it is entirely present and another who insists it is entirely future, and has concluded that theologians…