Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60106. Moral evil is the wickedness that people do to one another, and it is the sharpest form of the oldest objection to the Christian faith. If God is good, He would want to prevent it. If He is almighty, He could. Evil exists. Something in the argument has to give. I want to…
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 08131. The question of why God create Satan in the first place is usually asked with more feeling than curiosity, and I understand why. If God knew what this creature would become, and made him anyway, then the trail of misery running through human history seems to lead back to a decision God took…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8006. Angelic free will is one of those doctrines that seems abstract until you realise it is the only way to explain how evil entered a universe made entirely good. Something went wrong before Genesis 3, and it went wrong among creatures who were not deceived by a serpent, because they were the serpent….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7108 Arminian theology is the other great system in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it is almost as frequently misrepresented as Calvinism. Many who reject Calvinism assume they must therefore be Arminian, and many Calvinists use the word as a synonym for shallow thinking. Neither assumption survives contact with the actual documents. I am…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7040. Prevenient grace is a term drawn mainly from Wesleyan and Arminian theology, and the word prevenient simply means going before. It describes a work of God in a person that comes before conversion, enabling a response that would otherwise be impossible. The doctrine exists to answer a genuine problem: if sin has damaged…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07038. Irresistible grace, sometimes called efficacious or effectual grace, is the fourth point of the Calvinist system. It teaches that when God sets out to save one of His elect, that saving work cannot fail and cannot finally be refused. The person will come, and will come willingly, because God has changed the will…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does not teach that human beings are as wicked as they could possibly be. It teaches that sin has reached every part of us, so that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10113. We will have free will in heaven, and we will have far more of it than we do now, but we will never sin. Those two statements only look contradictory if we have accepted a definition of freedom that the Bible never uses, namely that being free means being permanently poised between good…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5037. Free will is one of those subjects where philosophers tie knots, theologians draw swords, and ordinary believers quietly wonder what they are allowed to think. So let me say at the outset where I stand: yes, we have free will, because the Bible everywhere treats human beings as responsible persons whose choices are…