Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60008. Asking what makes Christianity unique invites a certain kind of answer, the sort that lists our advantages and sounds rather pleased with itself. I want to avoid that, because the things that actually set the gospel apart are not achievements we can be smug about. Every one of them is something done to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13013. The five solas are the shorthand history has given us for what the Reformers recovered about salvation. Sola is simply Latin for alone, and each one is a small word with a very large fence around it, because in every case the argument was about what else might be allowed to stand alongside….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral obligation. It appears in Galatians 6:2 and again, in a slightly different form, in 1 Corinthians 9:21, where Paul describes himself as not being outside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7087. The Five Solas are the five Latin slogans that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and to the glory of God alone. Every one of them is a statement of exclusion, which is the point of the word sola, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7084. Whether the worst sinners imaginable could be forgiven is a question people ask in two very different tones of voice, and the tone matters. Some ask it as a challenge, expecting Christianity to flinch. Others ask it because of somebody in their own family, and they need to know whether there is a…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let…