Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10004. Progressive dispensationalism is the name of a revision movement that arose among dispensational scholars in the late twentieth century, and if you have heard the term and wondered whether it is a refinement or a retreat, you are asking the right question. The movement’s leading names are Craig Blaising, Darrell Bock, and Robert…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10003. Covenant theology and dispensational theology are the two great rival frameworks by which evangelical Christians organise the storyline of Scripture, and the difference between them is not a quarrel over charts; it decides how you read prophecy, how you understand Israel, how you relate law to grace, and what you expect God to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10002. The seven dispensations of the classic dispensational scheme raise an immediate question for anyone new to this subject: does the Bible actually number them, or is seven a human tidy-up? Let me be straight with you from the start. Scripture never says, there are seven dispensations, any more than it says, there is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10001. Dispensational theology is one of the most misrepresented frameworks in the modern church, dismissed by critics who have rarely read its careful exponents and caricatured as a novelty invented in the nineteenth century. So let me tell you plainly what it actually is. Dispensational theology is, at heart, a commitment to reading the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5026. Resurrection bodies are the great forgotten hope of the Christian faith. Ask the average believer what happens after death and you will hear about souls going to heaven, which is true as far as it goes, but it is only the interval, not the finale. The Bible’s final hope is not disembodied souls…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3062. The other resurrections of the Bible are far less famous than the empty tomb, but they are worth knowing well: nine raisings by my count, spread from the days of Elijah to the ministry of Paul. People genuinely dead were genuinely restored to life, and each account is told with the Bible’s characteristic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3061. Christianity stands or falls on bodily resurrection, and Paul says so without blinking: ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). Yet ask around, even in churches, and you will find remarkable confusion about what resurrection actually means. Is it the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3040. The resurrection body of Jesus is the single best piece of evidence for what your own future body will be like. That is not my speculation; it is Paul’s explicit argument. Christ has been raised as ‘the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Corinthians 15:20), and the firstfruits of a harvest…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2076. Is God in hell? The question of God in hell sounds like a strange question, almost a trick, but I get asked it seriously and often, usually by someone trying to work out whether hell means total abandonment by God or something else. The honest answer depends entirely on what we mean by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2067. Divine eternity is the doctrine underneath one of the most fascinating questions in all of theology, and one with genuinely practical consequences for how I read Scripture’s prophetic material. When we speak of God knowing the future, we naturally reach for spatial metaphors. God looks ahead. He foresees events. He knows in advance…